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ELIZABETH 
AND HER 
GERMAN 
GARDEN. 


NEW YORK: 

J. S. OGILVIE PUBLISHING COMPANY, 
6t Rose Street. 


tXb 

."Rqis^ 

E 


486555 

AUG 2 7 1942 


Elizabeth and Her German Garden. 


May 7. — I love my garden. I am writing in 
it now in the late afternoon loveliness, much 
interrupted by the mosquitoes and the tempta- 
tion to look at all the glories of the new green 
leaves washed half an hour ago in a cold show- 
er. Two owls are perched near me, and are 
carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as 
much as any warbling of nightingales. The 



gentleman owl says 


and she 


answers from her tree a little way off, beau- 



tifully assenting to and com- 


pleting her lord’s remark, as becomes a proper- 
ly constructed German she-owl. They say the 
same thing over and over again so emphatic- 
ally that I think it must be something nasty 
about me; but I shall not let myself be fright- 
ened away by the sarcasm of owls. 


ELIZABETH AHD HER OEBMAH QARDEH. 


This is less a garden than a wilderness. No 
one has lived in the house, much less in the 
garden, for twenty-five years, and it is such a 
pretty old place that the people who might 
have lived here and did not, deliberately pre- 
ferring the horrors of a flat in a town, must 
have belonged to that vast number of eyeless 
and earless persons of whom the world seems 
chiefly composed. Noseless too, though it does 
not sound pretty; but the greater part of my 
spring happiness is due to the scent of the wet 
earth and young leaves. 

I am always happy (out of doors, be it under- 
stood, for indoors there are servants and furni- 
ture), but in quite different ways, and my spring 
happiness bears no resemblance to my summer 
or autumn happiness, though it is not more 
intense, and there were days last winter when 
I danced for sheer joy out in my frost-bound 
garden in spite of my years and children. But 
I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for 
the decencies. 

There are so many bird-cherries around me, 
great trees with branches sweeping the grass, 
and they are so wreathed just now with white 
blossoms and tenderest green, that the garden 
8 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


looks like a wedding. I never saw such masses 
of them; they seem to fill the place. Even 
across a little stream that bounds the garden 
on the east, and right in the middle of the corn- 
field beyond, there is an immense one, a pic- 
ture of grace and glory against the cold blue of 
the spring sky. 

My garden is surrounded by cornfields and 
meadows, and beyond are great stretches of 
sandy heath and pine forests, and where the 
forests leave off the bare heath begins again; 
but the forests are beautiful in their lofty, pink- 
stemmed vastness, for overhead the crowns of 
softest gray-green, and underfoot a bright 
green whortleberry carpet, and everywhere the 
breathless silence; and the bare heaths are 
beautiful too, for one can see across them into 
eternity almost, and to go out onto them with 
one’s face toward the setting sun is like going 
into the very presence of God. 

In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird- 
cherries and greenery where I spend my happy 
days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray 
stone house with many gables where I pass my 
reluctant nights. The house is very old, and 
has been added to at various times. It was a 
9 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEN. 


convent before the Thirty Years’ War, and the 
vaulted chapel, with its brick floor worn by 
pious peasant knees, is now used as a hall. Gus- 
tavus Adolphus and his Swedes passed through 
more than once, as is duly recorded in archives 
still preserved, for we are on what was then 
the highroad between Sweden and Branden- 
burg the unfortunate. The Lion of the North 
was no doubt an estimable person and acted 
wholly up to his convictions, but he must have 
sadly upset the peaceful nuns, who were not 
without convictions of their own, sending them 
out onto the wide, empty plain to piteously 
seek some life to replace the life of silence here. 

From nearly all the windows of the house I 
can look out across the plain, with no obstacle 
in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue line 
of distant forest, and on the west side uninter- 
ruptedly to the setting sun — nothing but a 
green, rolling plain, with a sharp edge against 
the sunset. I love those west windows l)ettcr 
than any others, and have chosen my bedroom 
on that side of the house so that even times of 
hair-brushing may not be entirely lost; and the 
young woman who attends to such matters has 
been taught to fulfill her duties about a mistress 
10 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAH OARDEH. 


recumbent in an easy-chair before an open win- 
dow, and to not profane with chatter that sweet 
and solemn time. This girl is grieved at rny 
habit of living almost in the garden, and all 
her ideas as to the sort of life a respectable Ger- 
man lady should lead have got into a sad 
muddle since she came to me. The people 
round about are persuaded that I am, to put it 
as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for 
the news has traveled that I spend the day out 
of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye 
has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why 
cook when you can get some one to cook for 
you? And as for sewing, the maids will hem 
the sheets better and quicker than I could, and 
all forms of needlework of the fancy order are 
inventions of the Evil One for keeping the fool- 
ish from applying their hearts to wisdom. 

We had been married five years before it 
struck us that we might as well make use of 
this place by coming down and living in it. 
Those five years were spent in a flat in a town, 
and during their whole interminable length I 
was perfectly miserable and perfectly healthy, 
which disposes of the ugly notion that has at 
times disturbed me that my happiness here is 
11 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


less due to the garden than to a good diges- 
tion. And while we were wasting our lives 
there, here was this dear place, with dandelions 
up to the very door, all the paths grass- grown 
and completely effaced, in winter so lonely, 
with nobody but the north wind taking the least 
notice of it, and in May — in all those five lovely 
Mays — no one to look at the wonderful bird- 
cherries and still more wonderful masses of li- 
lacs, everything glowing and blowing, the Vir- 
ginia creeper madder every year until at last, 
in October, the very roof was wreathed with 
blood-red tresses, the owls and the squirrels 
and all the blessed little birds reigning su- 
preme, and not a living creature ever entering 
the empty house except the snakes, which got 
into the habit during those silent years of wrig- 
gling up the south wall into the rooms on that 
side whenever the old housekeeper opened the 
windows. All that was here, — peace, and hap- 
piness, and a reasonable life, — and yet it never 
struck me to come and live in it. Looking back 
I am astonished, and can in no way account for 
the tardiness of my discovery that here, in this 
far-away corner, was my kingdom of heaven. 
Indeed, so little did it enter my head to even 
12 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


use the place in summer, that I submitted to 
weeks of seaside life, with all its horrors, every 
year; until at last, in the early spring of last 
year, having come down for the opening of the 
village school, and wandering out afterward in- 
to the bare and desolate garden, I don’t know 
what smell of wet earth or rotting leaves 
brought back my childhood with a rush, and all 
the happy days I had spent in a garden. Shall 
I ever forget that day ? It was the beginning of 
my real life; my coming of age, as it were, and 
entering into my kingdom. Early March, gray, 
quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth; leafless and 
sad and lonely enough out there in the damp 
and silence, yet there I stood feeling the same 
rapture of pure delight in the first breath of 
spring that I used to as a child; and the five 
wasted years fell from me like a cloak, and the 
world was full of hope, and I vowed myself then 
and there to nature, and have been happy ever 
since. 

My other half being indulgent, and with some 
faint thought perhaps that it might be as well 
to look after the place, consented to live in it, 
at any rate for a time; whereupon followed six 
specially blissful weeks from the end of April 
13 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


into June, during which I was here alone, sup- 
posed to be superintending the painting and pa- 
pering, but, as a matter of fact, only going into 
the house when the workmen had gone out 
of it. 

How happy I was! I don’t remember any 
time quite so perfect since the days when I 
was too little to do lessons and was turned out 
with sugar on my eleven-o’clock bread and but- 
ter onto a lawn closely strewn with dandelions 
and daisies. The sugar on the bread and but- 
ter has lost its charm, but I love the dandelions 
and daisies even more passionately now than 
then, and never would endure to see them all 
mown away if I were not certain that in a day 
or two they would be pushing up their little 
faces again as jauntily as ever. During those 
six weeks I lived in a world of dandelions and 
delights. The dandelions carpeted the three 
lawns — they used to be lawns, but have long 
since blossomed out into meadows filled with 
every sort of pretty weed — and under and 
among the groups of leafless oaks and beeches 
were blue hepaticas, white anemones, violets, 
and celandines in sheets. The calandines in par- 
ticular delighted me, with their clean, happy 
14 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERHAN GARDEN. 


brightness, so beautifully trim and newly var- 
nished, as though they too had had the painters 
at work on them. Then, when the anemones 
went, came a few stray periwinkles and Solo- 
mon’s-seal, and all the bird-cherries blossomed 
in a burst. And then, before I had a little got 
used to the joy of their flowers against the sky, 
came the lilacs— -masses and masses of them, 
in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and 
trees by the side of walks, and one great con- 
tinuous bank of them half a mile long right past 
the west front of the house, away down as far 
as one could see, shining glorious against a 
background of firs. When that time came, and 
when, before it was over, the acacias all blos- 
somed too, and four great clumps of pale, 
silvery-pink peonies flowered under the south 
windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, 
and thankful, and grateful, that I really cannot 
describe it. My days seemed to melt away in 
a dream of pink and purple peace. 

There were only the old housekeeper and her 
handmaiden in the house, so that on the plea of 
not giving too much trouble I could indulge 
what my other half calls my fantaisie dereglee 
as regards meals — that is to say, meals so 
15 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


simple that they could be brought out to the li- 
lacs on a tray ; and I lived, I remember, on salad 
and bread and tea the whole time, sometimes a 
very tiny pigeon appearing at lunch to save me, 
as the old lady thought, from starvation. Who 
but a woman could have stood salad for six 
weeks, even salad sanctified by the presence and 
scent of the most gorgeous lilac masses ? I did, 
and grew in grace every day, though I have 
never liked it since. How often now, oppressed 
by the necessity of assisting at three dining- 
room meals daily, two of which are conducted 
by the functionaries held indispensable to a 
proper maintenance of the family dignity, and 
all of which are pervaded by joints of meat, how 
often do I think of my salad days, forty in num- 
ber, and of the blessedness of being alone as I 
was then alone! 

And then the evenings, when the workmen 
had all gone and the house was left to empti- 
ness and echoes, and the old housekeeper had 
gathered up her rheumatic limbs into her bed, 
and my little room in quite another part of the 
house had been set ready, how reluctantly 1 
used to leave the friendly frogs and owls, and, 
with my heart somewhere down in my shoes, 
16 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


lock the door to the garden behind me, and 
pass through the long series of echoing south 
rooms full of shadows and ladders and ghostly 
pails of painters’ mess, and, humming a tune to 
make myself believe I liked it, go rather slowly 
across the brick-floored hall, up the creaking 
stairs, down the long white washed passage, and 
with a final rush of panic whisk into my room 
and double lock and bolt the door! 

There were no bells in the house, and I used 
to take a great dinner bell to bed with me so 
that at least I might be able to make a noise if 
frightened in the night, though what good it 
would have been I don’t know, as there was no 
one to hear. The housemaid slept in another 
little cell opening out of mine, and we two were 
the only living creatures in the great empty 
west wing. She evidently did not believe in 
ghosts, for I could hear how she fell asleep 
immediately after getting into bed; nor do I 
believe in them, ‘'mais je les redoute” as a 
French lady said, who from her books appears 
to have been strong-minded. 

The dinner bell was a great solace; it was 
never rung, but it comforted me to see it on the 
chair beside my bed, as my nights were any- 
17 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


thing but placid, it was all so strange, and there 
were such queer creakings and other noises. I 
used to lie awake for hours, startled out of a 
light sleep by the cracking of some board, and 
listen to the indifferent snores of the girl in the 
next room. In the morning, of course, I was 
as brave as a lion and much amused at the cold 
perspirations of the night before; but even the 
nights seem to me now to have been delightful, 
and myself like those historic boys who heard a 
voice in every wind and snatched a fearful joy. 
I would gladly shiver through them all over 
again for the sake of the beautiful purity of the 
house, empty of servants and upholstery. 

How pretty the bedrooms looked, with noth- 
ing in them but their cheerful new papers! 
Sometimes I w^ould go into those that were 
finished and build up all sorts of castles in the 
air about their future and their past. Would 
the nuns who had lived in them know their lit- 
tle whitewashed cells again, all gay with delicate 
flower papers and clean white paint? And how 
astonished they would be to see cell No. 14 turned 
into a bathroom, with a bath big enough to 
insure a cleanliness of body equal to their purity 
of soul ! They would look upon it as a snare of 
18 


ELIZABETH AH D HER GERM AH GARDEH. 


the Tempter; and I know that in my own case 
I only began to be shocked at the blackness of 
my nails the day that I began to lose the first 
whiteness of my soul by falling in love at fif- 
teen with the parish organist, or rather with the 
glimpse of surplice and Roman nose and fiery 
mustache which was all I ever saw of him, and 
which I loved to distraction for at least six 
months; at the end of which time, going out 
with my governess one day, I passed him in 
the street, and discovered that his unofficial 
garb was a frock-coat combined with a turn- 
down collar and a “bowler” hat, and never 
loved him any more. 

The first part of that time of blessedness was 
the most perfect, for I had not a thought of 
anything but the peace and beauty all round 
me. Then he appeared suddenly who has a 
right to appear when and how he will, and re- 
buked me for never having written, and when I 
told him that I had been literally too happy to 
think of writing, he seemed to take it as a reflec- 
tion on himself that I could be happy alone. I 
took him round the garden along the new paths 
I had had made, and showed him the acacia and 
lilac glories, and he said that it was the purest 
19 




ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


selfishness to enjoy myself when neither he nor 
the offspring were with me, and that the lilacs 
wanted thorough pruning. I tried to appease 
him by offering him the whole of my salad and 
toast supper which stood ready at the foot of 
the little veranda steps when we came back, but 
nothing appeased that Man of Wrath, and he 
said he would go straight back to the neglected 
family. So he went; and the remainder of the 
precious time was disturbed by twinges of con- 
science (to which I am much subject) whenever 
I found myself wanting to jump for joy. I went 
to look at the painters every time my feet were 
for taking me to look at the garden; I trotted 
diligently up and down the passages; I criti- 
cised and suggested and commanded more in 
one day than I had done in all the rest of the 
time ; I wrote regularly and sent my love ; but I 
could not manage to fret and yearn. What are 
you to do if your conscience is clear and your 
liver in order and the sun is shining? 


May 10. — I knew nothing whatever last year 
about gardening and this year know very little 
more, but I have dawnings of what may be 
30 


ELIZABETE AND EER GERMAN GARDEN 


done, and have at least made one great stride — 
from ipomaea to tea-roses. 

The garden was an absolute wilderness. It 
is all round the house, but the principal part is 
on the south side and has evidently always been 
so. The south front is one-storied, a long 
series of rooms opening one into the other, and 
the walls are covered with Virginia creeper. 
There is a little veranda in the middle, leading 
by a flight of rickety wooden steps down into 
what seems to have been the only spot in the 
whole place that was ever cared for. This is a 
semicircle cut into the lawn and edged with 
privet, and in this semicircle are eleven beds of 
different sizes bordered with box and arranged 
round a sun-dial, and the sun-dial is very vener- 
able and moss-grown, and greatly beloved by 
me. These beds were the only sign of any at- 
tempt at gardening to be seen (except a soli- 
tary crocus that came up all by itself each spring 
in the grass, not because it wanted to, but be- 
cause it could not help it), and these I had sown 
with ipomaea, the whole eleven, having found a 
German gardening book, according to which 
ipomaea in vast quantities was the one thing 
needful to turn the most hideous desert into a 
21 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


paradise. Nothing else in that book was rec- 
ommended with anything like the same warmth, 
and being entirely ignorant of the quantity of 
seed necessary, I bought ten pounds of it and 
had it sown not only in the eleven beds, but 
round nearly every tree, and then waited in great 
agitation for the promised paradise to appear. 
It did not, and I learned my first lesson. 

Luckily I had sown two great patches of 
sweet-peas, which made me very happy all t!: : 
summer, and then there were some sunflowers 
and a few hollyhocks under the south windows, 
with Madonna lilies in between. But the lilies, 
after being transplanted, disappeared, to my 
great dismay, for how was I to know it was the 
way of lilies ? And the hollyhocks turned out to 
be rather ugly colors, so that my first summer 
was decorated and beautified solely by sweet- 
peas. 

At present we are only just beginning to 
breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and 
borders and paths made in time for this sum- 
mer. The eleven beds round the sun-dial are 
filled with roses, but I see already that I have 
made mistakes with some. As I have not a liv- 
ing soul with whom to hold communion on this 
22 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


or, indeed, on any matter, my only way of 
learning is by making mistakes. All eleven 
were to have been carpeted with purple pansies, 
but finding that I had not enough and that no- 
body had any to sell me, only six have got their 
pansies, the others being sown with dwarf mi- 
gnonette. Two of the eleven are filled with 
Marie van Hcutie roses, two with Viscountess 
Folkestone, two with Laurette Messimy, one 
with Souvenir de la Malmaison, one with Adam 
and Devoniensis, two with Persian Yellow and 
Bicolor, and one big bed behind the sun-dial 
with three sorts of red roses (seventy-two m 
all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt Scarlet, and Prefet 
de Limburg. This bed is, I am sure, a mis- 
take, and several of the others are, I think, but 
of course I must wait and see, being such an 
ignorant person. Then I have had two long 
beds made in the grass on either side of the 
semicircle, each sown with mignonette, and one 
filled with Marie van Houtte, and the other 
with Jules Finger and the Bride ; and in a warm 
corner under the drawing-room windows is a 
bed of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watte- 
ville, and Comtesse Riza du Parc; while farther 
down the garden, sheltered on the north and 
2S 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAE GARDEN. 


west by a group of beeches and lilacs, is another 
large bed, containing Rubens, Madame Joseph 
Schwartz, and the Hon. Edith Gifford. All 
these roses are dwarf; I have only two stand- 
ards in the whole garden, two Madame George 
Bruants,. and they look like broomsticks. How 
I long for the day when the teas open their 
buds ! Never did I look forward so intensely 
to anything; and every day I go the rounds, 
admiring what the dear little things have 
achieved in the twenty-four hours in the way of 
new leaf or increase of lovely red shoot. 

The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) 
are still under the south windows in a narrow 
border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot 
of which I have sown two long borders of 
swxet-peas facing the rose beds, so that my 
roses may have something almost as sweet as 
themselves to look at until the autumn, when 
everything is to make place for more tea-roses. 
The path leading away from this semicircle 
down the garden is bordered with China roses,- 
white and pink, with here and there a Persian 
Yellow. I wish now I had put teas there, and 
I have misgivings as to the effect of the Persian 
Yellows among the Chinas, for the Chinas are 
24 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


such wee little baby things, and the Persian 
Yellows look as though they intended to be big 
bushes. 

There is not a creature in all this part of the 
world who could in the least understand with 
what heart-beatings I am looking forward to 
the flowering of these roses, and not a German 
gardening book that does not relegate all teas 
to hothouses, imprisoning them for life, and de- 
priving them forever of the breath of God. It 
was no doubt because I was so ignorant that I 
rushed in where Teutonic angels fear to tread, 
and made my teas face a northern winter; but 
they did face it under fir branches and leaves, 
and not one has suffered, and they are looking 
to-day as happy and as determined to enjoy 
themselves as any roses, I am sure, in Europe. 


May 14. — To-day I am writing on the veran- 
da with the three babies, more persistent than 
mosquitoes, raging round me, and already sev- 
eral of the thirty fingers have been in the ink- 
pot and the owners consoled when duty point- 
ed to rebukes. But who can rebuke such pen- 
itent and drooping sunbonnets? I can see noth- 
25 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


ing but sunbonnets and pinafores and nimble 
black legs. 

These three, their patient nurse, myself, the 
gardener, and the gardener’s assistant are the 
only people who ever go into my garden, but 
then neither are we ever out of it. The gar- 
dener has been here a year, and has given me 
notice regularly on the first of every month, 
but up to now has been induced to stay on. On 
the first of this month he came as usual, and 
with determination written on every feature 
told me he intended to go in June, and that 
nothing should alter his decision. I don’t think 
he knows much about gardening, but he can at 
least dig and water, and some of the things he 
sows comes up, and some of the plants he plants 
grow, besides which he is the most unflagging- 
ly industrious person I ever saw, and has the 
great merit of never appearing to take the faint- 
est interest in what we do in the garden. So I 
have tried to keep him on, not knowing what 
the next one may be like, and when I asked 
him what he had to complain of and he replied 
“Nothing,” I could only conclude that he has a 
personal objection to me because of my ec- 
centric preference for plants in groups rather 
26 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAE GARDEN. 


than plants in lines. Perhaps, too, he does not 
like the extracts from gardening books I read 
to him sometimes when he is planting or sow- 
ing something new. Being so helpless myself I 
thought it simpler, instead of explaining, to take 
the book itself out to him and let him have wis- 
dom at its very source, administering it in doses 
while he worked. I quite recognize that this 
must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to 
lose a whole year through some stupid mis- 
take has given me the courage to do it. I 
laugh sometimes behind the book at his dis- 
gusted face, and wish we could be photo- 
graphed, so that I may be reminded in twenty 
years’ time, when the garden is a bower of 
loveliness and I learned in all its ways, of my 
first happy struggles and failures. 

All through April he was putting the peren- 
nials we had sown in the autumn into their per- 
manent places, and all through April he went 
about with a long piece of string making 
parallel lines down the borders of beautiful ex- 
actitude and arranging the poor plants like sol- 
diers at a review. Two long borders were done 
during my absence one day, and when I ex- 
plained that I should like the third to have 
27 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


plants in groups and not in lines, and that what 
I wanted was a natural effect, with no bare 
spaces of earth to be seen, he looked even more 
gloomily hopeless than usual ; and on my going 
out later on to see the result I found he had 
planted two long borders down the sides of a 
straight walk with little lines of five plants in a 
row — first five pinks, and next to them five 
rockets, and behind the rockets five pinks, and 
behind the pinks five rockets, and so on with 
different plants of every sort and size down to 
the end. When I protested, he said he had only 
carried out my orders and had known it would 
not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining 
borders were done after the pattern of the first 
two ; and I will have patience and see how they 
look this summer, before digging them up 
again; for it becomes beginners to be humble. 

If I could only dig and plant myself! How 
much easier, besides being so fascinating, to 
make your own holes exactly where you want 
them and put in your plants exactly as you 
choose, instead of g’iving orders that can only 
be half understood from the moment you de- 
part from the lines laid down by that long piece 
of string I In the first ecstasy of having a gar- 
38 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


den all my own, and in my burning impatience 
to make the waste places blossom like a rose, I 
did one warm Sunday in last year’s April, dur- 
ing the servants’ dinner hour, doubly secure 
from the gardener by the day and the dinner, 
slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly 
dig a little piece of ground and break it up 
and sow surreptitious ipomaea, and run back 
very hot and guilty into the house and get into 
a chair and behind a book and look languid just 
in time to save my reputation. And why not? 
It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but 
it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had 
a spade in Paradise and known what to do with 
it, we should not have had all that sad business 
of the apple. 

What a happy woman I am, living in a gar- 
den, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and 
plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town 
acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, 
and burying, and I don’t know what besides, 
and would rend the air with their shrieks if 
condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as 
if I were blest above all my fellows in being able 
to find my happiness so easily. I believe I 
should always be good if the sun always shone, 
^9 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH QARDEH, 


and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on 
a fine day. And what can life in town offer in 
the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any 
one of the calm evenings I have had this month 
sitting alone at the foot of the veranda steps, 
with the perfume of young larches all about 
and the May moon hanging low over trie 
beeches, and the beautiful silence made only 
more profound in its peace by the croaking of 
distant frogs and the hooting of owls ? A cock- 
chafer, darting by close to my ear with a loud 
hum, sends a shiver through me, partly of pleas- 
ure at the reminder of past summers, and partly 
of fear lest he should get caught in my hair. 
The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious 
creatures and should be killed. I would rather 
get the killing done at the end of the summer, 
and not crush them out of such a pretty world 
at the very beginning of all the fun. 

This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My 
eldest baby, born in April, is five years old, and 
the youngest, born in June, is three; so that the 
discerning will at once be able to guess the age 
of the remaining middle or May baby. While 
I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks 
planted on the top of the only thing in the shape 
30 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAE GARDEE. 


of a hill the garden possesses, the April baby, 
who had been sitting pensive on a tree stump 
close by, got up suddenly and began to run aim- 
lessly about, shrieking and wringing her hands 
with every symptom of terror. I stared, won- 
dering what had come to her; and then I saw 
that a whole army of young cows, pasturing in 
a field next to the garden, had got through the 
hedge and were grazing perilously near my tea- 
roses and most precious belongings. The 
nurse and I managed to chase them away, but 
not before they had trampled down a border of 
pinks and lilies in the cruelest way, and made 
great holes in a bed of China roses, and even 
begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I 
am trying to persuade to climb up a tree trunk. 
The gloomy gardener happened to be ill in bed, 
and the assistant was at vespers, — as Lutheran 
Germany calls afternoon tea or its equivalent, — 
so the nurse filled up the holes as well as she 
could with mold, burying the crushed and 
mangled roses, cheated forever of their hopes 
of summer glory, and I stood by looking on de- 
jectedly. The June baby, who is two feet 
square and valiant beyond her size and years, 
seized a stick much bigger than herself and 
31 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEH. 


went after the cows, the cowherd being no- 
where to be seen. She planted herself in front 
of them, brandishing her stick, and they stood 
in a row and stared at her in great astonish- 
ment; and she kept them off until one of the 
men from the farm arrived with a whip, and 
having found the cowherd sleeping peacefully 
in the shade gave him a sound beating. The 
cowherd is a great hulking young man, much 
bigger than the man who beat him, but he took 
his punishment as part of the day’s work and 
made no remark of any sort. It could not have 
hurt him much through his leather breeches, 
and I think he deserved it; but it must be de- 
moralizing work for a strong young man with 
no brains looking after cows. Nobody with 
less imagination than a poet ought to take it up 
as a profession. 

After the June baby and I had been -wel- 
comed back by the other two with as many hugs 
as though we had been restored to them from 
great perils, and while we were peacefully 
drinking tea under a beech tree, I happened to 
look up into its mazy green, and there, on a 
branch quite close to my head, sat a little baby 
owl. I got on the seat and caught it easily, for 
3 ^ 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


it could not fly, and how it had reached the 
branch at all is a mystery. It is a little round 
ball of gray fluff, with the quaintest, wisest, sol- 
emn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let it 
go, but the temptation to keep it until the Man 
of Wrath, at present on a journey, has seen it, 
was not to be resisted, as he has often said how 
much he would like to have a young owl and 
try to tame it. So I put it into a roomy cage 
and slung it up on a branch near where it had 
been sitting, and which cannot be far from its 
nest and its mother. We had hardly subsided 
again to our tea when I saw two more balls of 
fluff on the ground, in the long grass and 
scarcely distinguishable at a little distance from 
small mole-hills. These were promptly united 
to their relation in the cage, and now when the 
Man of Wrath comes home not only shall he be 
welcomed by a wife wreathed in the orthodox 
smiles, but by the three little longed-for owls. 
Only it seems wicked to take them from their 
mother, and I know that I shall let them go 
again some day — perhaps the very next time 
the Man of Wrath goes on a journey. I put a 
small pot of water in the cage, though they 
never could have tasted water yet unless they 
33 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEN, 


drink the raindrops off the beech leaves. I 
suppose they get all the liquid they need from 
the bodies of the mice and other dainties pro- 
vided for them by their fond parents. But the 
raindrop idea is prettier. 

May 15. — How cruel it was of me to put 
those poor little owls into a cage even for one 
night ! I cannot forgive myself, and shall 
never pander to the Man of Wrath’s wishes 
again. This morning I got up early to see how 
they were getting on, and I found the door of 
the cage wide open and no owls to be seen. I 
thought, of course, that somebody had stolen 
them — some boy from the village, or perhaps 
the chastised cowherd. But looking about I 
saw one perched high up in the branches of the 
beech tree, and then to my dismay one lying 
dead on the ground. The third was nowhere to 
be seen, and is probably safe in its nest. The 
parents must have torn at the bars of the cage 
until by chance they got the door open, and 
then dragged the little ones out and up into the 
tree. The one that is dead must have been 
blown off the branch, as it was a windy night, 
and its neck is broken. There is one happy life 
34 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


less in the garden to-day through my fault, and 
it is such a lovely, warm day — ^just the sort of 
weather fur young soft things to enjoy and 
grow in. The babies are greatly distressed, and 
are digging a grave and preparing funeral 
wreaths of dandelions. 

Just as I had written that I heard sounds of 
arrival, and running out I breathlessly told the 
Man of Wrath how nearly I had been able to 
give him the owls he has so often said he would 
like to have, and how sorry I was they were 
gone, and how grievous the death of one, and 
so on, after the voluble manner of women. 

He listened till I paused to breathe, and then 
he said, ‘T am surprised at such cruelty. How 
could you make the mother owl suffer so ? She 
had never done you any harm.” 

Which sent me out of the house and into the 
garden more convinced than ever that he sang 
true who sang, 

^'Two paradises 'twere in one to live in Paradise 
alone.” 

May i6. — The garden is the place I go to for 
refuge and shelter, not the house. In the house 
35 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort 
and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out 
there blessings crowd round me at every step 
— it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness 
in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so 
much worse than they feel; it is there that all 
my sins and silliness are forgiven, there that I 
feel protected and at home, and every flower 
and weed is a friend and every tree a lover. 
When I have been vexed I run out to them for 
comfort, and when I have been angry without 
just cause, it is there that I find absolution. Did 
ever a woman have so many friends? And al- 
ways the same, always ready to welcome me and 
fill me with cheerful thoughts. Happy children 
of a common Father, why should I, their own 
sister, be less content and joyous than they? 
Even in' a thunderstorm, when other people 
are running into the house I run out of it. I do 
not like thunderstorms — they frighten me for 
hours before they come, because I always feel 
them on the way ; but it is odd that I should go 
for shelter in the garden. I feel better there, 
more taken care of, more petted. When it 
thunders, the April baby says, 'There's lieber 
Gott scolding those angels again." And once, 
36 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEN, 


when there was a storm in the night, she com- 
plained loudly and wanted to know why lieber 
Gott didn’t do the scolding in the daytime, as 
she had been so tight asleep. They all three 
speak a wonderful mixture of German and Eng- 
lish, and adulterating the purity of their native 
tongue by putting in English words in the mid- 
dle of a German sentence. It always reminds 
me of Justice tempered by Mercy. 

We have been cowslipping to-day in a little 
wood dignified by the name of the Hirschwald, 
because it is the happy hunting-ground of in- 
numerable deer who fight there in the autumn 
evenings, calling each other out to combat with 
hayings that ring through the silence and send 
agreeable shivers through the lonely listener. I 
often walk there in September, late in the even- 
ing, and sitting on a fallen tree listen fascinated 
to their angry cries. 

We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. 
The babies had never seen such things nor had 
imagined anything half so sweet. The Hirsch- 
wald is a little open wood of silver birches and 
springy turf starred with flowers, and there is a 
tiny stream meandering amiably about it and 
decking itself in June with yellow flags. I have 
37 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


dreams of having a little cottage built there, 
with the daisies up to the door, and no path of 
any sort — ^just big enough to hold myself and 
one baby inside and a purple clematis outside. 
Two rooms — a bedroom and a kitchen. How 
scared we would be at night, and how com- 
pletely happy by day! I know the exact spot 
where it should stand, facing southeast, so that 
we should get all the cheerfulness of the morn- 
ing, and close to the stream, so that we might 
wash our plates among the flags. Sometimes, 
when in the mood for society, we would invite 
the remaining babies to tea and entertain them 
with wild strawberries on plates of horse-chest- 
nut leaves; but no one less innocent and easily 
pleased than a baby would be permitted to 
darken the effulgence of our sunny cottage — in- 
deed, I don’t suppose that anybody wiser would 
care to come. Wise people want so many things 
before they can even begin to enjoy themselves, 
and I feel perpetually apologetic, when with 
them, for only being able to offer them that 
which I love best myself — apologetic, and 
ashamed of being so easily contented. 

The other day at a dinner party in the nearest 
town (it took us the whole afternoon to get 
38 


SLIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


there) the women after dinner were curious to 
know how I had endured the winter, cut off 
from everybody and snowed up sometimes for 
weeks. 

“Ah, these husbands !” sighed an ample lady, 
lugubriously shaking her head; “they shut up 
their wives because it suits them, and don’t care 
what their sufferings are.” 

Then the others sighed and shook their heads 
too, for the ample lady was a great local poten- 
tate, and one began to tell how another dread- 
ful husband had brought his young wife into 
the country and had kept her there, concealing 
her beauty and accomplishments from the pub- 
lic in a most cruel manner, and how, after 
spending a certain number of years in alternate- 
ly weeping and producing progeny, she had 
quite lately run away with somebody unspeak- 
able — I think it was the footman, or the baker, 
or some one of that sort. 

“But I am quite happy,” I began, as soon as 
I could put in a word. 

“Ah, a good little wife, making the best of 
it,” and the female potentate patted my hand, 
but continued to gloomily shake her head. 

39” 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


‘‘You cannot possibly be happy in the winter 
entirely alone/' asserted another lady, the wife 
of a high military authority and not accustomed 
to be contradicted. 

“But I am." 

“But how can you possibly be at your age? 
No, it is riot possible." 

“But I am." 

“Your husband ought to bring you to town 
in the winter." 

“But I don't want to be brought to town." 

“And not let you waste your best years 
buried." 

“But I like being buried." 

“Such solitude is not right." 

“But I'm not solitary." 

“And can come to no good." She was get- 
ting quite angry. 

There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last 
remark, and renewed shaking of heads. 

“I enjoyed the winter immensely," I persisted 
when they were a little quieter ; “I sleighed and 
skated, and then there were the children, and 

shelves and shelves full of " I was going 

to say books, but stopped. Reading is an oc- 
cupation for men; for women it is reprehensible 
40 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


waste of time. And how could I talk to them 
of the happiness I felt when the sun shone on 
the snow, or of the deep delight of hoar-frost 
days? 

“It is entirely my doing that we have come 
down here,'' I proceeded, “and my husband 
only did it to please me." 

“Such a good little wife," repeated the 
patronizing potentate, again patting my hand 
with an air of understanding all about it, “really 
an excellent little wife. But you must not let 
your husband have his own way too much, my 
dear, and take my advice and insist on his 
bringing you to town next winter." 

And then they fell to talking about their, 
cooks, having settled to their entire satisfaction 
that my fate was probably lying in wait for me 
too, lurking perhaps at that very moment be- 
hind the apparently harmless brass buttons of 
the man in the hall with my cloak. 

I laughed on the way home, and I laughed 
again for sheer satisfaction when we reached 
the garden and drove between the quiet trees to 
the pretty old house; and when I went into the 
library, with its four windows open to the 
41 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QEBMAH GARDES. 


moonlight and the scent, and looked round at 
the familiar bookshelves, and could hear no 
sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I 
might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose 
with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful 
I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me 
here and given me a heart to understand my 
own blessedness, and rescued me from a life 
like that I had just seen — a life spent with the 
odors of other people’s dinners in one’s nos- 
trils, and the noise of their wrangling servants 
in one’s ears, and parties and tattle for all 
amusement. 

But I must confess to having felt sometimes 
quite crushed when some grand person, exam- 
ining the details of my home through her eye- 
glass, and coolly dissecting all that I so much 
prize from the convenient distance of the open 
window, has finished up by expressing sym- 
pathy with my loneliness, and on my protesting 
that I like it, has mvLvmvirtd/'sehr anspruchslos.” 
Then I have felt ashamed of the fewness of my 
wants; but only for a moment, and only under 
the withering influence of the eyeglass; for aft- 
er all, the owner’s spirit is the same spirit as 
that which dwells in my servants — girls whose 
4 ^ 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


one idea of happiness is to live in a town where 
there are others of their sort with whom to 
drink beer and dance on Sunday afternoons. 
The passion for being forever with one’s fel- 
lows, and the fear of being left for a few hours 
alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I 
can entertain myself quite well for weeks to- 
gether, hardly aware, except for the pervading 
peace, that I have been alone at all. Not but 
what I like to have people staying with me for 
a few days, or even for a few weeks, should 
they be as anspruchslos as I am myself, and 
content with simple joys; only, any one who 
comes here and would be happy must have 
something in him; if he be a mere blank crea- 
ture, empty of head and heart, he will very 
probably find it dull. I should like my house 
to be often full if I could find people capable of 
enjoying themselves. They should be welcomed 
and sped with equal heartiness; for truth com- 
pels me to confess that, though it pleases me to 
see them come, it pleases me just as much to 
see them go. 

On some very specially divine days, like to- 
day, I have actually longed for some one else to 
43 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEH, 


be here to enjoy the beauty with me. There 
has been rain in the night, and the whole garden 
seems to be singing — not the untiring birds 
only, but the vigorous plants, the happy grass 
and trees, the lilac bushes — oh, those lilac 
bushes! They are all out to-day, and the gar- 
den is drenched with the scent. I have brought 
in armfuls, the picking is such a delight, and 
every pot and bowl and tub in the house is filled 
with purple glory, and the servants think there 
is going to be a party and are extra nimble, and 
I go from room to room gazing at the sweet- 
ness, and the windows are all flung open so as 
to join the scent within to the scent without; 
and the servants gradually discover that there 
is no party, and wonder why the house should 
be filled with flowers for one woman by herself, 
and I long more and more for a kindred spirit 
— it seems so greedy to have so much loveli- 
ness to one’s self — ^but kindred spirits are so 
very, very rare; I might almost as well cry for 
the moon. It is true that my garden is full of 
friends, only they are — dumb. 

June 3. — This is such an out-of-the-way cor- 
ner of the world that it requires quite unusual 
44 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


energy to get here at all, and I am thus de- 
livered from casual callers; while, on the other 
hand, people I love, or people who love me, 
which is much the same thing, are not likely to 
be deterred from coming: by the roundabout 
train journey and the long drive at the end. 
Not the least of my many blessings is that we 
have only one neighbor. If you have to have 
neighbors at all, it is at least a mercy that there 
should be only one; for with people dropping 
in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how 
are you to get on with your life, I should like 
to know, and read your books, and dream your 
dreams to your satisfaction? Besides, there is 
always the certainty that either you or the drop- 
per-in will say something that would have been 
better left unsaid, and I have a holy horror of 
gossip and mischief-making. A woman’s tongue 
is a deadly weapon and the most difficult thing 
in the world to keep in order, and things slip 
off it with a facility nothing short of appalling 
at the very moment when it ought to be most 
quiet. In such cases the only safe course is to 
talk steadily about cooks and children, and to 
pray that the visit may not be too prolonged, 
45 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


for if it is you are lost. Cooks I have found to 
be the best of all subjects — the most phlegmatic 
flush into life at the mere word, and the joys 
and sufferings connected with them are ex- 
periences common to us all. 

Luckily, our neighbor and his wife are both 
busy and charming, with a whole troop of flax- 
en-haired little children to keep them occupied, 
besides the business of their large estate. Our 
intercourse is arranged on lines of the most 
beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year, 
and she returns the call a fortnight later; they 
ask us to dinner in the summer, and we ask 
them to dinner in the winter. By strictly keep- 
ing to this, we avoid all danger of that closer 
friendship which is only another name for fre- 
quent quarrels. She is a pattern of what a Ger- 
man country lady should be, and is not only a 
pretty woman, but an energetic and practical 
one, and the combination is, to say the least, 
effective. She is up at daylight superintending 
the feeding of the stock, the butter-making, the 
sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand 
things get done while most people are fast 
asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfast 
she is off in her pony-carriage to the other 
46 


ELIZABETH AlID HER GERMAII GARDEN. 


farms on the place, to rate the ‘‘mamsells,” as 
the head women are called, to poke into every 
corner, lift the lids off the saucepans, count the 
new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any care- 
less dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law 
to administer “slight corporal punishment” to 
our servants, it being left entirely to individual 
taste to decide what “slight” shall be, and my 
neighbor really seems to enjoy using this privi- 
lege, judging from the way she talks about it. 
I would give much to be able to peep through 
a keyhole and see th^ dauntless little lady, ter- 
rible in her wrath and dignity, standing on tip- 
toe to box the ears of some great strapping girl 
big enough to eat her. 

The making of cheese and butter and sau- 
sages excellently well is a work which requires 
brains, and is, to my thinking, a very admirable 
form of activity, and entirely worthy of the 
attention of the intelligent. That my neighbor 
is intelligent is at once made evident by the 
bright alertness of her eyes — eyes that noth- 
ing escapes, and that only gain in prettiness by 
being used to some good purpose. She is a 
recognized authority for miles around on the 
mysteries of sausage-making, the care of 
47 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


calves, and the slaughtering of swine; and with 
all her manifold duties and daily prolonged ab- 
sences from home, her children are patterns of 
health and neatness, and of what dear little Ger- 
man children, with white pigtails and fearless 
eyes and thick legs, should be. Who shall say 
that such a life is sordid and dull and un- 
worthy of a high order of intelligence? I pro- 
test that to me it is a beautiful life, full of 
wholesome outdoor work, and with no room 
for those listless moments of depression and 
boredom, and of wondering what you will do 
next, that leave wrinkles round a pretty wom- 
an’s eyes, and are not unknown even to the 
most brilliant. But while admiring my neigh- 
bor, I don’t think I shall ever try to follow in 
her steps, my talents not being of the energetic 
and organizing variety, but rather of that or- 
der which makes their owner almost lamentably 
prone to take up a volume of poetry and wan- 
der out to where the kingcups grow, and, sit- 
ting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, 
forget the very existence of everything but 
green pastures and still waters, and the glad 
blowing of the wind across the joyous fields. 
And it would make me perfectly wretched to be 
48 




tJLlZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


confronted by ears so refractory as to require 
boxing. 

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my 
solitude, and it is on these occasions that I 
realize how absolutely alone each individual is, 
and how far away from his neighbor, and while 
they talk (generally about babies past, present, 
and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and 
impassable distance that separates one’s own 
soul from the soul of the person sitting in the 
next chair. I am speaking of comparative 
strangers, people who are forced to stay a cer- 
tain time by the eccentricities of trains, and in 
whose presence you grope about after com- 
mon interests and shrink back into your shell 
on finding that you have none. Then a frost 
slowly settles down on me and I grow each 
minute more benumbed and speechless, and the 
babies feel the frost in the air and look vacant, 
and the callers go through the usual form of 
wondering who they most take after, generally 
settling the question by saying that the May 
baby, who is the beauty, is like her father, and 
that the two more or less plain ones are the 
image 'of me, and this decision, though I 
know it of old and am sure it is coming, never 
49 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


fails to depress me as much as though I heard 
it for the. first time. The babies are very little 
and inoffensive and good, and it is hard that 
they should be used as a means of filling up 
gaps in conversation, and their features pulled 
to pieces one by one, and all their weak points 
noted and criticised, while they stand smiling 
shyly in the operator’s face, their very smile 
drawing forth comments on the shape of their 
mouths ; but, after all, it does not occur 
very often, and they are one of those few inter- 
ests one has in common with other people, as 
everybody seems to have babies. A garden, I 
have discovered, is by no means a fruitful topic, 
and it is amazing how few persons really 
love theirs — they all pretend they do, but you 
can hear by the very tone of their voice what a 
lukewarm affection it is. About June their in- 
terest is at its warmest, nourished by agreeable 
supplies of strawberries and roses, but on re- 
flection I don’t know a single person within 
twenty miles who really cares for his garden, 
or has discovered the treasures of happiness 
that are buried in it, and are to be found if 
sought for diligently and, if needs be, with 
tears. 


50 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


It is after these rare calls that I experience 
the only moments of depression from which I 
ever suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a 
well-nourished person, for allowing even a 
single precious hour of life to be spoiled by 
anything so indifferent. That is the worst of 
being fed enough and clothed enough and 
warmed enough and of having everything you 
can reasonably desire — on the least provoca- 
tion you are made uncomfortable and unhappy 
by such abstract discomforts as being shut out 
from a nearer approach to your neighbor’s 
soul ; which is on the face of it foolish, the prob- 
ability being that he hasn’t got one. 

The rockets are all out. The gardener in a fit 
of inspiration put them right along the very 
front of two borders, and I don’t know what 
his feelings can be now that they are all flower- 
ing and the plants behftid are completely hid- 
den; but I have learned another lesson, and no 
future gardener shall be allowed to run riot 
among my rockets in quite so reckless a fash- 
ion. They are charming things, as delicate in 
color as in scent, and a bowl of them on my 
writing-table fills the room with fragrance. 
Single rows, however, are a mistake; I had 
51 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


masses of them planted in the grass, and these 
show how lovely they can be. A border full of 
rockets, mauve and white, and nothing else, 
must be beautiful; but I don’t know how long 
they last nor what they look like when they 
have done flowering. This I shall find out in a 
week or two, I suppose. Was ever a would- 
be gardener left so entirely to his own blunder- 
ings? No doubt it would be a gain of years to 
the garden if I were not forced to learn solely 
by my failures, and if I had some kind crea- 
ture to tell me when to do things. At present 
the only flowers in the garden are the rockets, 
the pansies in the rose beds, and two groups of 
azaleas — mollis and pontica. The azaleas have 
been and still are gorgeous; I only planted 
them this spring, and they almost at once be- 
gan to flower, and the sheltered corner they are 
in looks as though it were filled with imprisoned 
and perpetual sunsets. Orange, lemon, pink 
in every delicate shade — what they will be next 
year and in succeeding years, when the bushes 
are bigger, I can imagine from the way they 
have begun life. On gray, dull days the effect 
is absolutely startling. Next autumn I shall 
make a great bank of them in front of a belt of 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH QARDEH. 


fir trees in rather a gloomy nook. My tea- 
roses are covered with buds which will not 
open for at least another week, so I conclude 
this is not the sort of climate where they will 
flower from the very beginning of June to 
November, as they are said to do. 

July II. — ^There has been no rain since the 
day before Whitsunday, five weeks ago, which 
partly, but not entirely, accounts for the disap- 
pointment my beds have been. The dejected 
gardener went mad soon after Whitsuntide and 
had to be sent to an asylum. He took to going 
about with a spade in one hand and a revolver 
in the other, explaining that he felt safer that 
way, and we bore it quite patiently, as becomes 
civilized beings who respect each other’s prej- 
udices, until one day, when I mildly asked him 
to tie up a fallen creeper — ^and after he bought 
the revolver my tones in addressing him were 
of the mildest, and I quite left off reading to 
him aloud — he turned around, looked me 
straight in the face for the first time since he 
has been here, and said, '‘Do I look like Graf 
X [a great local celebrity], or like a mon- 

key?” After which there was nothing for it 

53 


ELIZABETH AHD HER OERMAH OARDEH, 


but to get him into an asylum as expeditiously 
as possible. There was no gardener to be had 
in his place, and I have only just succeeded in 
getting one ; so that what with the drought, and 
the neglect, and the gardener’s madness, and 
my blunders, the garden is in a sad condition; 
but even in its sad condition it is the dearest 
place in the world, and all my mistakes only 
make me more determined to persevere. 

The long borders, where the rockets were, are 
looking dreadful. The rockets have done flow- 
ering, and after the manner of rockets, in other 
walks of life, have degenerated into sticks; and 
nothing else in those borders intends to bloom 
this summer. The giant poppies I had planted 
out in them in April have either died oif or re- 
mained quite small, and so have the colum- 
bines ; here and there a delphinium droops un- 
willingly, and that is all. I suppose poppies 
cannot stand being moved, or perhaps they 
were not watered enough at the time of trans- 
planting; anyhow, those borders are going to 
be sown to-morrow with more poppies for next 
year; for poppies I will have whether they 
like it or not, and they shall not be touched, 
only thinned out. 


54 


ELIZABETH Al^D HER GERMAH GARDEH. 


Well, it is no use being grieved, and, after 
all, directly I come out and sit under the trees, 
and look at the dappled sky, and see the sun- 
shine on the cornfields away on the plain, all 
the disappointment smooths itself out, and it 
seems impossible to be sad and discontented 
when everything about me is so radiant and 
kind. 

To-day is Sunday, and the garden is so quiet 
that, sitting here in this shady corner watching 
the lazy shadows stretching themselves across 
the grass, and listening to the rooks quarreling 
in the treetops, I almost expect to hear English 
church bells ringing for the afternoon service. 
But the church is three miles off, has no bells, 
and no afternoon service. Once a fortnight 
we go to morning prayer at eleven and sit up 
in a sort of private box with a room behind, 
whither we can retire unobserved when the 
sermon is too long or our flesh too weak, and 
hear ourselves being prayed for by the black- 
robed parson. In winter the church is bitterly 
cold; it is not heated, and we sit muffled up in 
more furs than ever we wear out of doors ; but 
it would of course be very wicked for the par- 
son to wear furs, however cold he may be, so 
55 


ELIZABETH AUD HER QERMAH GARDEH, 


he puts on a great many extra coats under his 
gown, and, as the winter progresses, swells to 
a prodigious size. We know when spring is 
coming by the reduction in his figure. The 
congregation sit at ease while the parson does 
the praying for them, and while they are dron- 
ing the long-drawn-out chorales he retires 
into a little wooden box just big enough to hold 
him. He does not come out until he thinks we 
have sung enough, nor do we stop until his ap- 
pearance gives us the signal. I have often 
thought how dreadful it would be if he fell ill in 
his box and left us to go on singing. I am 
sure we should never dare to stop, unauthor- 
ized by the Church. I asked him once what he 
did in there ; he looked very shocked at such a 
profane question, and made an evasive reply. 

If it were not for the garden, a German Sun- 
day would be a terrible day ; but in the garden 
on that day there is a sigh of relief and more 
profound peace, nobody raking or sweeping or 
fidgeting; only the little flowers themselves and 
the whispering trees. 

I have been much afflicted again lately by 
visitors — not stray callers to be got rid of after 
a due administration of tea and things you are 
56 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH QARDEH, 


sorry afterward that you said, but people stay- 
ing in the house and not to be got rid of at all. 
All June was lost to me in this way, and it was 
from first to last a radiant month of heat and 
beauty; but a garden where you meet the peo- 
ple you saw at breakfast, and will see again at 
lunch and dinner, is not a place to be happy in. 
Besides, they had a knack of finding out my 
favorite seats and lounging in them just when 
I longed to lounge myself ; and they took books 
out of the library with them, and left them 
face downward on the seats all night to get well 
drenched with dew, though they might hav? 
known that what is meat for roses is poison for 
books; and they gave me to understand that if 
they had had the arranging of the garden it 
would have been finished long ago — whereas 
I don’t believe a garden ever is finished. They 
have all gone now, thank Heaven, except one, 
so that I have a little breathing space before 
others begin to arrive. It seems that the 
place interests people, and that there is a sort 
of novelty in staying in such a deserted corner 
of the world, for they were in a perpetual stat^ 
of mild amusement at being here at all. 

Irais is the only one left. She is a 3^oun;. 

57 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


woman with a beautiful, refined face, and her 
eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particu- 
larly lovable. At meals she dips her bread into 
the salt-cellar, bites a bit off, and repeats the 
process, although providence (taking my 
shape) has caused salt-spoons to be placed at 
convenient intervals down the table. She 
lunched to-day on beer, Schweinekoteletten, 
and cabbage-salad with caraway seeds in it, 
and now I hear her through the open window, 
extemporizing touching melodies in her charm- 
ing cooing voice. She is thin, frail, intelligent, 
and lovable, all on the above diet. What bet- 
ter proof can be needed to establish the superi- 
ority of the Teuton than the fact that after 
such meals he can produce such music? Cab- 
bage-salad is a horrid invention, but I don’t 
doubt its utility as means of encouraging 
thoughtfulness ; nor will I quarrel with it, since 
it results so poetically, any more than I quar- 
rel with the manure that results in roses, and I 
give it to Irais every day to make her sing. 
She is the sweetest singer I have ever heard, 
and has a charming trick of making up songs 
as she goes along. When she begins I go and 
lean out of the window and look at my little 
58 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAE GARDEE, 


friends out there in the borders while listening 
to her music, and feel full of pleasant sadness 
and regret. It is so sweet to be sad when one 
has nothing to be sad about. 

The April baby came panting up just as I 
had written that, the others hurrying along be- 
hind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my 
admiration three brand-new kittens, lean and 
blind, that she was carrying in her pinafore, 
and that had just been found motherless in the 
wood-shed. 

“Look,” she cried breathlessly, “such a 
much r 

I was glad it was only kittens this time, for 
she had been once before this afternoon on pur- 
pose, as she informed me, sitting herself down 
on the grass at my feet, to ask about the lieher 
Gott, it being Sunday and her pious little 
nurse’s conversation having run, as it seems, 
on heaven and angels. 

Her questions about the lieber Gott are bet- 
ter left unrecorded, and I was relieved when 
she began about the angels. 

“What do they wear for clothes?” she asked 
in her German-English. 

“Why, you’ve seen them in pictures,” I an- 
59 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEH. 


swered, beautiful, long dresses, and with 
big, white wings.” 

“Feathers?” she asked. 

“I suppose so — and long dresses, all white and 
beautiful.” 

“Are they girlies?” 

“Girls? Ye— es.” 

“Don’t boys go into the Himmelf 

“Yes, of course, if they’re good.” 

“And then what do they wear?” 

“Why, the same as all the other angels, I 
suppose.” 

"Dwesses?” 

She began to laugh, looking at me sideways 
as though she suspected me of making jokes. 
“What a funny Mummy !” she said, evidently 
much amused. She has a fat little laugh that 
is very infectious. 

“I think,” said I gravely, “you had better 
go and play with the other babies.” 

She did not answer, and sat still a moment 
watching the clouds. I began writting again. 

“Mummy,” she said presently. 

“Well?” 

“Where do the angels get their dwesses?” 

I hesitated. “From lieber Gott'' I said. 

60 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH QARDEH. 

^‘Are there shops in the Himmelf 

“Shops? No” 

“But, then, where does lieher Gott buy their 
dwesses ?” 

“Now run away like a good baby; Fm busy.” 

“But you said yesterday, when I asked about 
lieber Gott, that you would tell about Him on 
Sunday, and it is Sunday. Tell me a story 
about Him.” 

There was nothing for it but resignation, so 
I put down my pencil with a sigh. “Call the 
others, then.” 

She ran away, and presently they all three 
emerged from the bushes one after the other, 
and tried all together to scramble onto my 
knee. The April baby got the knee as she al- 
ways seems to get everything, and the other 
two had to sit on the grass. 

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye 
to future parsonic probings. The April baby’s 
eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew 
redder and redder. I was surprised at the 
breathless interest she took in the story — the 
other two were tearing up tufts of grass and 
hardly listening. I had scarcely got to . the 
angels with the flaming swords and announced 
61 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


that that was all, when she burst out, ‘‘Now 
ril tell about it. Once upon a time there was 
Adam and Eve, and they had plenty of clothes, 
and there was no snake, and lieher Gott wasn't 
angry with them, and they could eat as many 
apples as they liked, and was happy forever and 
ever — there now !” 

She began to jump up and down defiantly on 
my knee. 

“But that’s not the story,” I said rather 
helplessly. 

“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now 
another.” 

“But these stories are true” I said severely; 
“and it’s no use my telling them if you make 
them up your own way afterward.” 

“Another! another!” she shrieked, jumping 
up and down with redoubled energy, all her 
silvery curls flying. 

I began about Noah and the Flood. 

“Did it rain so badly?” she asked with a face 
of the deepest concern and interest. 

“Yes, all day long and all night long for 
weeks and weeks 

“And was everybody so wet?” 

“Yes ” 


62 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN. 

‘‘But why didn’t they open their um- 
bwellas ?” 

Just then I saw the nurse coming out with 
the tea-tray. 

“I’ll tell you the rest another time,” I said, 
putting her off my knee, greatly relieved; “you 
must all go to Anna now and have tea.” 

“I don’t like Anna,” remarked the June 
baby, not having hitherto opened her lips ; “she 
is a stupid girl.” 

The other two stood transfixed with horror 
at this statement, for, besides being naturally 
extremely polite, and at all times anxious not 
to hurt any one’s feelings, they have been 
brought up to love and respect their kind little 
nurse. 

The April baby recovered her speech first, 
and lifting her finger pointed it at the criminal 
in just indignation. “Such a child will never 
go into the Himmel” she said with great em- 
phasis, and the air of one who delivers judg- 
ment. 

September 15. — ^This is the month of quiet 
days, crimson creepers, and blackberries; of 
mellow afternoons in the ripening garden; of 
63 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEN, 


tea under the acacias instead of the too shady 
beeches ; of wood-fir€ in the library in the chilly 
evenings. The babies go out in the afternoon 
and blackberry in the hedges; the three kit- 
tens, grown big and fat, sit cleaning themselves 
on the sunny veranda steps ; the Man of Wrath 
shoots partridges across the distant stubble; 
and the summer seems as though it would 
dream on forever. It is hard to believe that in 
three months we shall probably be snowed up 
and certainly be cold. There is a feeling about 
this month that reminds me of March and the 
early days of April, when spring is still hesitat- 
ing on the threshold and the garden holds its 
breath in expectation. There is the same mild- 
ness in the air, and the sky and grass have the 
same look as then ; but the leaves tell a differ- 
ent tale, and the reddening creeper on the house 
is rapidly approaching its last and loveliest 
glory. 

My roses have behaved as well on the whole 
as was to be expected, and the Viscountess 
Folkestones and Laurette Messimys have been 
most beautiful, the latter being quite the love- 
liest things in the garden, each flower an ex- 
quisite loose cluster of coral-pink petals paling 
64 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEH. 

at the base to a yellow-white. I have ordered 
a hundred standard teas for planting next 
month, half of which are Viscountess Folke- 
stones, because the teas have such a way of 
hanging their little heads that one has to kneel 
down to be able to see them well in the dwarf 
forms — not but what I entirely approve of 
kneeling before such perfect beauty, only it 
dirties one’s clothes. So I am going to put 
standards down each side of the walk under the 
south windows, and shall have the flowers on a 
convenient level for worship. My only fear is 
that they will stand the winter less well than the 
dwarf sorts, being so difficult to pack up snug- 
ly. The Persian Yellows and Bicolors have 
been, as I predicted, a mistake among the teas ; 
they only flower twice in the season, and all the 
rest of the time look dull and moping ; and then 
the Persian Yellows have such an odd smell and 
so many insects inside them eating them up. I 
have ordered Safrano tea-roses to put in their 
place, as they all come out next month and are 
to be grouped in the grass; and the semicircle 
being immediately under the windows, besides 
having the best position in the place, must be 
reserved solely for my choicest treasures. I 
65 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


have had a great many disappointments, but 
feel as though I were really beginning to learn. 
Humility and the most patient perseverance 
seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain 
and sunshine, and every failure must be used as 
a stepping-stone to something better. 

I had a visitor last week who knows a great 
deal about gardening and has had much prac- 
tical experience. When I heard he was coining 
I felt I wanted to put my arms right around 
my garden and hide it from him ; but what was 
my surprise and delight when he said, after 
having gone all over it, '‘Well, I think you have 
done wonders.” Dear me, how pleased I was ! 
It was so entirely unexpected, and such a com- 
plete novelty after the remarks I have been lis- 
tening to all the summer. I could have hugged 
that discerning and indulgent critic, able to 
look beyond the result to the intention, and ap- 
preciating the difficulties of every kind that had 
been in the way. After that I opened my heart 
to him, and listened reverently to all he had 
to say, and treasured up his kind and encourag- 
ing advice, and wished he could stay here a 
whole year and help me through the seasons. 
But he went, as people one likes always do go, 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


and he was the only guest I have had whose de- 
parture made me sorry. 

The people I love are always somewhere else 
and not able to come to me, while I can at any 
time fill the house with visitors about whom I 
know little and care less. Perhaps if I saw 
more of those absent ones I would not love 
them so well — at least, that is what I think on 
wet days when the wind is howling round the 
house and all nature is overcome with grief ; and 
it has actually happened once or twice when 
great friends have been staying with me that I 
have wished, when they left, I might not see 
them again for at least ten years. I suppose the 
fact is that no friendship can stand the break- 
fast test, and here, in the country, we invariably 
think it our duty to appear at breakfast. Civili- 
zation has done away with curl-papers, yet at 
that hour the soul of the Hausfrau is as tightly 
screwed up in them as was ever her grand- 
mother's hair; and though my body comes 
down mechanically, having been trained that 
way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks 
of beginning to wake up for other people till 
lunch-time, and never does so completely till it 
has been taken out of doors and aired in the 
67 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


sunshine. Who can begin conventional, amia- 
bility the first thing in the morning? It is the 
hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; 
it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the 
Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the 
Graces never thought of having breakfast any- 
where but in bed. 

November lo. — Last night we had ten de- 
grees of frost (Fahrenheit), and I went out the 
first thing this morning to see what had become 
of the tea-roses, and behold, they were wide 
awake and quite cheerful — covered with rime, it 
is true, but anything but black and shriveled. 
Even those in boxes on each side of the veran- 
da steps were perfectly alive and full of buds, 
and one in particular, a Bouquet d’Or, is a mass 
' buds and would flower if it could get the 
'3t encouragement. I am beginning to think 
at the tenderness of teas is much exagger- 
ated, and am certainly very glad I had the 
courage to try them in this northern garden. 
But I must not fly too boldly in the face of 
Providence, and have ordered those in the 
boxes to be taken into the greenhouse for the 
winter, and hope the Bouquet d’Or, in a sunny 
place near the glass, may be induced to open 
68 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


some of those buds. The greenhouse is only 
used as a refuge, and kept at a temperature just 
above freezing, and is reserved entirely for such 
plants as cannot stand the very coldest part of 
the winter out of doors. I don’t use it for 
growing anything, because I don’t love things 
that will only bear the garden for three or four 
months in the year and require coaxing and 
petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full 
of strong, healthy creatures, able to stand 
roughness and cold without dismally giving in 
and dying. I never could see that delicacy of 
constitution is pretty, either in plants or wom- 
en. No doubt there, are many lovely flowers to be 
had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for 
each of these there are fifty others still love- 
lier that will gratefully grow in God’s whole- 
some air and are blessed in return with a far 
greater intensity of scent and color. 

We have been very busy till now getting the 
permanent beds into order and planting the 
new tea-roses, and I am looking forward to 
next summer with more hope than ever in spite 
of my many failures. I wish the years would 
pass quickly that will bring my garden to per- 
fection! The Persian Yellows have gone into 
69 


ELIZABETH AFD HER QERMAH HARDEN. 


their new quarters, and their place is occupied 
by the tea-rose Safrano; all the rose beds are 
carpeted vi^ith pansies sown in July and trans- 
planted in October, each bed having a separate 
color. The purple ones are the most charm- 
ing and go well with every rose, but I have 
white ones with Laurette Messimy, and yellow 
ones with Safrano, and a new red sort in the 
big center bed of red roses. Round the semi- 
circle on the south side of the little privet hedge 
two rows of annual larkspurs in all their deli- 
cate shades have been sown, and just beyond 
the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semicircle of 
standard tea and pillar roses. In front of the 
house the long borders have been stocked with 
larkspurs, annual and perennial, columbines, 
giant poppies, pinks. Madonna lilies, wall flow- 
ers, hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies, lav- 
ender, starworts, cornflowers. Lychnis chalce- 
donica, and bulbs packed in wherever bulbs 
could go. These are the borders that were so 
hardly used by the other gardener. The spring 
boxes for the veranda steps have been filled 
with pink and white and yellow tulips. I love 
tulips better than any other spring flower; they 
are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and 
70 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a 
wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a 
stout lady whose every movement weighs down 
the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate 
scent is refinement itself ; and is there anything 
in the world more charming than the sprightly 
way they hold up their little faces to the sun? I 
have heard them called bold and flaunting, but 
to me they seem modest grace itself, only al- 
ways on the alert to enjoy life as much as they 
can and not afraid of looking the sun or any- 
thing else above them in the face. On the grass 
there are two beds of them carpeted with for- 
get-me-nots; and in the grass, in scattered 
groupS) are daffodils and narcissus. Down the 
wilder shrubbery walks foxgloves and mulleins 
will (I hope) shine majestic; and one cool cor- 
ner, backed by a group of firs, is graced by Ma- 
donna lilies, white foxgloves, and columbines. 
In a distant glade I have made a spring garden 
round an oak tree that stands alone in the sun 
— groups of crocuses, daffodils, narcissus, hya- 
cinths, and tulips, among such flowering shrubs 
and trees as Pirus Malus spectabilis, flori- 
bunda, and coronaria; Prunus Juliana, Ma- 
haleb, serotina, triloba, and Pissardi; Cydonias 
71 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


and Weigelias in every color, and several kinds 
of CratcCgus and other May loveliness. If the 
weather behaves itself nicely, and we get gentle 
rains in due season, I think this little corner 
will be beautiful — but what a big “if” it is! 
Drought is our great enemy, and the two last 
summers each contained five weeks of blazing, 
cloudless heat when all the ditches dried up 
and the soil was like hot pastry. At such times 
the watering is naturally quite beyond the 
strength of two men ; but as a garden is a place 
to be happy in, and not one where you want to 
meet a dozen curious eyes at every turn, I 
should not like to have more than these two, or 
rather one and a half — the assistant having 
stork-like proclivities and going home in the 
autumn to his native Russia, returning in the 
spring with the first warm winds. I want to 
keep him over the winter, as there is much to 
be done even then, and I sounded him on the 
point the other day. He is the most abject- 
looking of human beings — lame, and afflicted 
with a hideous eye-disease; but he is a good 
worker and plods along unwearyingly from 
sunrise to dusk. 

“Pray, my good stork,” said I, or German 
72 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


words to that effect, “why don’t you stay here 
altogether, instead of going home and rioting 
away all you have earned?” 

“I would stay,” he answered, “but I have 
my wife there in Russia.” 

“Your wife !” I exclaimed, stupidly surprised 
that the poor deformed creature should have 
found a mate — as though there were not a su- 
perfluity of mates in the world — “I didn’t know 
you were married?” 

“Yes, and I have two little children, and I 
don’t know what they would do if I were not to 
come home. But it is a very expensive journey 
to Russia, and costs me every time seven 
marks.” 

“Seven marks !” 

“Yes, it is a great sum.” 

I wondered whether I should be able to get 
to Russia for seven marks, supposing I were to 
be seized with an unnatural craving to go there. 

All the laborers who work here from March 
to December are Russians and Poles, or a mix- 
ture of both. We send a man over who can 
speak their language to fetch as many as he 
can early in the year, and they arrive with their 
bundles, men and women and babies, and as 
73 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN , GARDEN. 


soon as they have got here and had their fares 
paid they disappear in the night if they get the 
chance, sometimes fifty of them at a time, to go 
and work singly or in couples for the peasants, 
who pay them a pfennig or two more a day 
than we do, and let them e^at with the family. 
From us they get a mark and a half to two 
marks a day and as many potatoes as they can 
eat. The women get less, not because they 
work less, but because they are women and 
must not be encouraged. The overseer lives 
with them, and has a loaded revolver in his 
pocket and a savage dog at his heels. For the 
first week or two after their arrival the forest- 
ers and other permanent officials keep guard at 
night over the houses they are put into. I sup- 
pose they find it sleepy work; for certain it is 
that spring after spring the same thing happens, 
fifty of them getting away in spite of all our pre- 
cautions, and we are left with our mouths open 
and much out of pocket. This spring, by some 
mistake, they arrived without their bundles, 
which had gone astray on the road, and, as they 
travel in their best clothes, they refused utterly 
to work until their luggage came. Nearly a 


U 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


week was lost waiting, to the despair of all in 
authority. 

Nor vv^ill any persuasions induce them to do 
anything on Saints’ days, and there surely never 
was a church so full of them as the Russian 
Church. In the spring, when every hour is of 
vital importance, the work is constantly being 
interrupted by them, and the workers lie sleep- 
ing in the sun the whole day, agreeably con- 
scious that they are pleasing themselves and the 
Church at one and the same time — a state of 
perfection as rare as it is desirable. Reason un- 
aided by Faith is of course exasperated at this 
waste of precious time, and I confess that dur- 
ing the first mild days after the long winter 
frost, when it is possible to begin to work the 
ground, I have sympathized with the gloom of 
the Man of Wrath, confronted in one week by 
two or three empty days on which no man will 
labor, and have listened in silence to his re- 
marks about distant Russian saints. 

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount 
of civilization that made me pity these people 
when first I came to live among them. They 
herd together like animals and do the work of 
animals ; but in spite of the armed overseer, the 
75 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEH. 


dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed 
down by weak vinegar and water, I am begin- 
ning to believe that they would strongly object 
to soap, I am sure they would not wear new 
clothes, and I hear them coming home from 
their work at dusk singing. They are like little 
children or animals in their utter inability to 
grasp the idea of a future; and, after all, if you 
work all day in God’s sunshine, when evening 
comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for 
rest and not much inclined to find fault with 
your lot. I have not yet persuaded myself, 
however, that the women are happy. They 
have to work as hard as the men and get less 
for it ; they have to produce offspring, quite re- 
gardless of times and seasons and the general 
fitness of things ; they have to do this as expedi- 
tiously as possible, so that they may not unduly 
interrupt the work in hand ; nobody helps them, 
notices them, or cares about them, least of all 
the husband. It is quite a usual thing to see 
them working in the fields in the morning, and 
working again in the afternoon, having in the 
interval produced a baby. The baby is left to 
an old woman whose duty it is to look after 
babies collectively. When I expressed my hof' 
76 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


ror at the poor creatures working immediately 
afterward as though nothing had happened, the 
Man of Wrath informed me that they did not 
suffer because they had never worn corsets, 
nor had their mothers and grandmothers. We 
were riding together at the time, and had just 
passed a batch of workers, and my husband 
was speaking to the overseer when a woman 
arrived alone, and taking up a spade began to 
dig. She grinned cheerfully at us as she made 
a courtesy, and the overseer remarked that she 
had just been back to the house and had a bab)^ 

“Poor, poor woman!” I cried, as we rode 
on, feeling for some occult reason very angry 
with the Man of Wrath. “And her wretched 
husband doesn’t care a rap, and will probably 
beat her to-night if his supper isn’t right. What 
nonsense it is to talk about the equality of the 
sexes when the women have the babies!” 

“Quite so, my dear,” replied the Man of 
Wrath, smiling condescendingly. “You have- 
got to the very root of the matter. Nature,, 
while imposing this agreeable duty on the worn- 
an, weakens her and disables her for any seri- 
ous competition with man. How can a person 
who is constantly losing a year of the best part 
77 


ELIZABhJTH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


of her life compete with a young man who 
never loses any time at all? He has the brute 
force, and his last word on any subject could 
always be his fist.” 

I said nothing. It was a dull, gray afternoon 
in the beginning of November, and the leaves 
dropped slowly and silently at our horses’ feet 
as we rode toward the Hirschwald. 

“It is a universal custom,” proceeded the 
Man of Wrath, “among these Russians, and I 
believe among the lower classes everywhere, 
and certainly commendable on the score of 
simplicity, to silence a woman’s objections and 
aspirations by knocking her down. I have 
heard it said that this apparently brutal action 
has anything but the maddening effect tenderly 
nurtured persons might suppose, and that the 
patient is soothed and satisfied with a rapidity 
and completeness unattainable by other and 
more polite methods. Do you suppose,” he 
went on, flicking a twig off a tree with his whip 
as we passed, “that the intellectual husband^, 
wrestling intellectually with the chaotic yearn- 
ings of his intellectual wife, ever achieves the 
result aimed at? He may and does go on 
wrestling till he is tired, but never does he iix 
78 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QEBMAH GARDEN. 


the very least convince her of her folly; while 
his brother in the ragged coat has got through 
the v^rhole business in less time than it takes me 
to speak about it. There is no doubt that these 
poor women fulfill their vocation far more thor- 
oughly than the women in our class, and, as 
the truest happiness consists in finding one’s 
vocation quickly and continuing in it all one’s 
days, I consider they are to be envied rather 
than not, since they are early taught, by the 
impossibility of argument with martial muscle, 
the impotence of female endeavor and the bless- 
ings of content.” 

'Tray go on,” I said politely. 

"These women accept their beatings with a 
simplicity worthy of all praise, and, far from 
considering themselves insulted, admire the 
strength and energy of the man who can ad- 
minister such eloquent rebukes. In Russia, not 
only may a man beat his wife, but it is laid 
down in the catechism and taught all boys at the 
time of confirmation as necessary at least once 
a week, whether she has done anything or not, 
for the sake of her general health and hap- 
piness.” 

I thought I observed a tendency in the Man 

79 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


of Wrath to rather gloat over these castiga- 
tions. 

'Tray, my dear man,'' I said, pointing with 
my whip, "look at that baby moon so innocent- 
ly peeping at us over the edge of the mist just 
behind that silver birch, and don't talk so much 
about women and things you don’t understand. 
What is the use of your bothering about fists 
and whips and muscles and all the dreadful 
things invented for the confusion of obstreper- 
ous wives? You know you are a civilized hus- 
band, and a civilized husband is a creature who 
has ceased to be a man.” 

"And a civilized wife?” he asked, bringing 
his horse close up beside me and putting his 
arm round my waist, "has she ceased to be a 
woman ?” 

"I should think so indeed — she is goddess, 
and can never be worshiped and adored 
enough.” 

"It seems to me,” he said, "that the conver- 
sation is growing personal.” 

I started off at a canter across the short 
springy turf. The Hirschwald is an enchanted 
place on such an evening, when the mists lie 
low on the turf, and overhead the delicate, bare 
80 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


branches of the silver birches stand out clear 
against the soft sky, while the little moon looks 
down kindly on the damp November world. 
Where the trees thicken into a wood the fra- 
grance of the wet earth and rotting leaves 
kicked up by the horses' hoofs fills my soul with 
delight. I particularly love that smell — it brings 
before me the entire benevolence of Nature, 
forever working death and decay, so piteous in 
themselves, into the means of fresh life and 
glory, and sending up sweet odors as she 
works. 

December 7. — I have been to England. I 
went for at least a month, and stayed a week in 
a fog and was blown home again in a gale. 
Twice I fled before the fogs into the country 
to see friends with gardens, but it was raining, 
and except the beautiful lawns (not to be had 
in the Fatherland) and the infinite possibilities, 
there was nothing to interest the intelligent and 
garden-loving foreigner, for the good reason 
that you cannot be interested in gardens under 
an umbrella. So I went back to the fogs, and 
after groping about for a few days more began 
to long inordinately for Germany. A terrific 
81 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH QARDEII. 


gale sprang up after I had started, and the 
journey both by sea and land was full of hor- 
rors, the trains in Germany being heated to 
such an extent that it is next to impossible to 
sit still, great gusts of hot air coming up under 
the cushions, the cushions themselves being 
very hot and the wretched traveler still hotter. 

But when I reached my home and got out of 
the train into the purest, brightest snow-atmos- 
phere, the air so still that the whole world seemed 
to be listening, the sky cloudless, the criso 
snow sparkling underfoot and on the trees, and 
a happy row of three beaming babies awaiting 
me, I was consoled for all my torments, only 
remembering them enough to wonder why I 
had gone away at all. 

The babies each had a kitten in one hand and 
an elegant bouquet of pine needles and grass in 
the other, and what with the due presentation of 
the bouquets and the struggles of the kittens, 
the hugging and kissing was much interfered 
with. Kittens, bouquets, and babies were all 
somehow squeezed into the sleigh, and off we 
went with jingling bells and shrieks of delight. 

‘‘Directly you comes home the fun begins,” 
said the May baby, sitting very close to me. 

82 


ELIZABETH AND HER HERMAN GARDEN. 


“How the snow purrs!’' cried the April baby, 
as the horses scrunched it up with their feet. 
The June baby sat loudly singing “The King 
of Love My Shepherd Is,” and swinging her 
kitten round by its tail to emphasize the 
rhythm. 

The house, half-buried in the snow, looked 
the very abode of peace; and I ran through all 
the rooms, eager to take possession of them 
again, and feeling as though I had been away 
forever. When I got to the library I came to a 
standstill — ^ah, the dear room, what happy 
times I have spent in it rummaging among 
the books, making plans for my garden, build- 
ing castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing 
nothing I There was a big peat fire blazing half 
up the chimney, and the old housekeeper had 
put pots of flowers about, and on the writing- 
table was a great bunch of violets scenting the 
rooms. “Oh, how good it is to be home again!” 
I sighed in my satisfaction. The babies clung 
about my knees, looking up at me with eyes full 
of love. Outside the dazzling snow and sun- 
shine, inside the bright room and happy faces — 
I thought of those yellow fogs and shivered. 

The library is not used by the Man of Wrath; 

83 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


it is neutral ground where we meet in the even- 
ings for an hour before he disappears into his 
own rooms — a series of very smoky dens in the 
southeast corner of the house. It looks, I am 
afraid, rather too gay for an ideal library; and 
its coloring, white and yellow, is so cheerful 
as to be almost frivolous. There are white 
bookcases all round the walls, and there is a 
great fireplace, and four windows, facing full 
south, opening onto my most cherished bit of 
garden, the bit round the sun-dial ; so that with 
so much color and such a big fire and such 
floods of sunshine it has anything but a sober 
air, in spite of the venerable volumes filling 
the shelves. Indeed, I should never be sur- 
prised if they skipped down from their places, 
and, picking up their leaves, began to dance. 

With this room to live in, I can look forward 
with perfect equanimity to being snowed up 
for any time Providence thinks proper; and to 
go into the garden in its snowed-up state is like 
going into a bath of purity. The first breath on 
opening the door is so ineffably pure that it 
makes me gasp, and I feel a black and sinful 
object in the midst of all the spotlessness. Yes- 
terday I sat out of doors near the sun-dial the 
84 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDE'Sf. 


whole afternoon, with the thermometer so many 
degrees below freezing that it will be weeks find- 
ing its way up again; but there was no wind, 
and beautiful sunshine, and I was well wrapped 
up in furs. I even had tea brought out there, 
to the astonishment of the menials, and sat till 
long after the sun had set, enjoying the frosty 
air. I had to drink the tea very quickly, for it 
showed a strong inclination to begin to freeze. 
After the sun had gone down the rooks came 
home to their nests in the garden with a great 
fuss and fluttering, and many hesitations and 
squabbles before they settled on their respec- 
tive trees. They flew over my head in hundreds 
with a mighty swish of wings, and when they 
had arranged themselves comfortably an in- 
tense hush fell upon the garden, and the house 
began to look like a Christmas card, with its 
white roof against the clear, pale green of the 
western sky, and lamp-light shining in the win- 
dows. 

I had been reading a Life of Luther lent 
me by our parson in the intervals between look- 
ing round me and being happy. He came one 
day with the book and begged me to read it, 
having discovered that my interest in Luther 
85 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


was not as living as it ought to be ; so I took it 
out with me into the garden, because the dull- 
est book takes on a certain saving grace if read 
out of doors, just as bread and butter, devoid of 
charm in the drawing room, is ambrosia eaten 
under a tree. I read Luther all the afternoon 
with pauses for refreshing glances at the gar- 
den and the sky, and much thankfulness in my 
heart. His struggles with devils amazed me; 
and I wondered whether such a day as that, full 
of grace and the forgiveness of sins, never 
struck him as something to make him relent 
even toward devils. He apparently never al- 
lowed himself to just be happy. He was a won- 
derful man, but I am glad I was not his wife. 

Our parson is an interesting person, and un- 
tiring in his efforts to improve himself. Both 
he and his wife study whenever they have a 
spare moment, and there is a tradition that she 
stirs her puddings with one hand and holds a 
Latin grammar in the other, the grammar, of 
course, getting the greater share of her atten- 
tion. To most German Hausfraus the dinners 
and the puddings are of paramount importance, 
and they pride themselves on keeping those 
parts of their houses that are seen in a state of 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDER. 


perpetual and spotless perfection, and this is 
exceedingly praiseworthy; but, I would humbly 
inquire, are there not other things even more 
important? And is not plain living and high 
thinking better than the other way about? And 
all too careful making of dinners and dusting of 
furniture takes a terrible amount of precious 
time, and — and with shame I confess that my 
sympathies are all with the pudding and the 
grammar. It cannot be right to be the slave of 
one’s household gods, and I protest that if my 
furniture ever annoyed me by wanting to be 
dusted when I wanted to be doing something 
else, and there was no one to do the dusting 
for me, I should cast it all into the nearest bon- 
fire and sit and warm my toes at the flames 
with great contentment, triumphantly selling 
my dusters to the very next peddler who was 
weak enough to buy them. Parsons’ wives 
have to do the housework and cooking them- 
selves, and are thus not only cooks and house- 
maids, but if they have children — and they al- 
ways do have children — ^they are head and un- 
der nurse as well; and besides these trifling 
duties have a good deal to do with their fruit 
and vegetable garden, and everything to do 
87 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEH. 


with their poultry. This being so, is it not pa- 
thetic to find a young woman bravely strug- 
gling to learn languages and keep up with her 
husband? If I were that husband, those pud- 
dings would taste sweetest to me that were 
served with Latin sauce. They are both se- 
verely pious, and are forever engaged in des- 
perate efforts to practice what they preach ; than 
which, as we all know, nothing is more dif- 
ficult. He works in his parish with the most 
noble self-devotion, and never loses courage, 
although his efforts have been several times re- 
warded by disgusting libels pasted up on the 
street-corners, thrown under doors, and even 
fastened to his own garden wall. The peasant 
hereabouts is past belief low and animal, and a 
sensitive, intellectual parson among them is 
really a pearl before swine. For years he has 
gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most liv- 
ing faith and hope and charity, and I sometimes 
wonder whether they are any better now in his 
parish than they were under his predecessor, a 
man who smoked and drank beer from Monday 
morning to Saturday night, never did a stroke 
of work, and often kept the scanty congregation 
waiting on Sunday afternoons while he finished 
88 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH QARDEH, 


his post-prandial nap. It is discouraging enough 
to make most men give in, and leave the parish 
to get to heaven or not as it pleases; but he 
never seems discouraged, and goes on sacrific- 
ing the best part of his life to these people, 
when all his tastes are literary, and all his incli- 
nations toward the life of the student. His con- 
victions drag him out of his little home at ail 
hours to minister to the sick and exhort the 
wicked ; they give him no rest, and never let him 
feel he has done enough; and when he comes 
home weary, after a day’s wrestling with his 
parishioners’ souls, he is confronted on his 
doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up on his own 
front door. He never speaks of these things, 
but how shall they be hid? Everybody here 
knows everything that happens before the day 
is over, and what we have for dinner is of far 
greater general interest than the most astound- 
ing political earthquake. They have a pretty, 
roomy cottage, and a good bit of ground ad- 
joining the churchyard. His predecessor used 
to hang out his washing on the tombstones to 
dry, but then he was a person entirely lost to 
all sense of decency, and had finally to be re- 
moved, preaching a farewell sermon of a most 
89 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAE GARDEE. 


vituperative description, and hurling invective 
at the Man of Wrath, who sat up in his box 
drinking in every word and enjoying himself 
thoroughly. The Man of Wrath likes novelty, 
and such a sermon had never been heard be- 
fore. It is spoken of in the village to this day 
with bated breath and awful joy. , 

December 22 . — Up to now we have had a 
beautiful winter. Clear skies, frost, little wind, 
and, except for a sharp touch now and then, 
very few really cold days. My windows are 
gay with hyacinths and lilies of the valley; and 
though, as I have said, I don’t admire the smell 
of hyacinths in the spring when it seems want- 
ing in youth and chastity next to that of other 
flowers, I am glad enough now to bury my 
nose in their heavy sweetness. In December 
one cannot afford to be fastidious; besides, one 
is actually less fastidious about everything in 
the winter. The keen air braces soul as well as 
body into robustness, and the food and the per- 
fume disliked in the summer are perfectly wel- 
come then. 

I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but 
have often locked myself up in a room alone, 
90 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the 
flower catalogues and make my lists of seeds 
and shrubs and trees for the spring. It is a 
fascinating occupation, and acquires an addi- 
tional charm when you know you ought to be 
doing something else, that Christmas is at the 
door, that children and servants and farm hands 
depend on you for their pleasure, and that if 
you don’t see to the decoration of the trees and 
house and the buying of the presents nobody 
else will. The hours fly by shut up with those 
catalogues and with Duty snarling on the other 
side of the door. I don’t like Duty — everything 
in the least disagreeable is always sure to be 
one’s duty. Why cannot it be my duty to make 
lists and plans for the dear garden? ‘‘And so 
it is” I insisted to the Man of Wrath, when he 
protested against what he called wasting my 
time upstairs. “No,” he replied sagely; “your 
garden is not your Duty, because it is your 
Pleasure.” 

What a comfort it is to have such wells of 
wisdom constantly at my disposal! Anybody 
can have a husband, but to few is it given to 
have a sage, and the combination of both is as 
rare as it is useful. Indeed, in its practical util- 
91 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


ity the only thing I ever saw to equal it is a sofa 
my neighbor has bought as a Christmas sur- 
prise for her husband, and which she showed me 
the last time I called there — a beautiful inven- 
tion, as she explained, combining a bedstead, a 
sofa, and a chest of drawers, and into which you 
put your clothes, and on top of which you put 
yourself, and if anybody calls in the middle of 
the night and you happen to be using the draw- 
ing room as a bedroom, you just pop the bed- 
clothes inside, and there you are discovered sit- 
ting in your sofa and looking for all the world 
as though you had been expecting visitors for 
hours. 

“Pray, does he wear pajamas?” I inquired. 

But she had never heard of pajamas. 

It takes a long time to make my spring lists. 
I want to have a border all yellow, every shade 
of yellow from the fieriest orange to nearly 
white, and the amount of work and studying of 
gardening books it costs me will only be appre- 
ciated by beginners like myself. I have been 
weeks planning it, and it is not nearly finished. 
I want it to be a succession of glories from May 
till the frosts, and the chief feature is to be the 
number of “ardent marigolds” — flowers that I 
92 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


very tenderly love — and nasturtiums. The nas- 
turtiums are to be of every sort and shade, and 
are to climb and creep and grow in bushes, and 
show their lovely flowers and leaves to the best 
advantage. Then there are to be eschscholtzias, 
dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca, 
yellow violas, yellow stocks, yellow sweet-peas, 
yellow lupins — everything that is yellow or that 
has a yellow variety. The place I have chosen for 
it is a long, wide border in the sun, at the foot of 
a grassy slope crowned with lilacs and pines and 
facing southeast. You go through a little pine 
wood, and, turning a corner, are to come sud- 
denly upon this bit of captured morning glory. 
I want it to be blinding in its brightness after 
the dark, cool path through the wood. 

That is the idea. Depression seizes me when 
I reflect upon the probable difference between 
the idea and its realization. I am ignorant, and 
the gardener is, I do believe, still more so; for 
he was forcing some tulips, and they have all 
shriveled up and died, and he says he cannot 
imagine why. Besides, he is in love with the 
cook, and is going to marry her after Christ- 
mas, and refuses to enter into any of my plans 
with the enthusiasm they deserve, but sits with 
93 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GEBMAH GARDEN, 


vacant eye dreamily chopping wood from 
Morning till night to keep the beloved one’s 
kitchen fire well supplied. I cannot understand 
any one preferring cooks to marigolds; those 
future marigolds, shadowy as they are, and 
whose seeds are still sleeping at the seedsman’s, 
have shone through my winter days like gold- 
en lamps. 

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for 
of course the first thing I should do would be 
to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I 
should have the delight of doing everything for 
my flowers with my own hands and need not 
waste time explaining what I want done, to 
somebody else. It is dull work giving orders 
and trying to describe the bright visions of 
one’s brain to a person who has no visions and 
no brain, and who thinks a yellow bed should 
be calceolarias edged with blue. 

I have taken care in . choosing my yellow 
plants to put down only those humble ones that 
are easily pleased and grateful for little, for my 
soil is by no means all that it might be, and to 
most plants the climate is rather trying. I 
feel really grateful to any flower that is sturdy 
and willing enough to flourish here. Pansies 
94 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH QARDEH. 


seem to like the place, and so do sweet-peas; 
pinks don’t, and after much coaxing gave hardl)'' 
any flowers last summer. Nearly all the roses 
were a success, in spite of the sandy soil, except 
the tea-rose Adam, which was covered with 
buds ready to open, when they suddenly turned 
brown and died, and three standard Dr. Grills 
which stood in a row and simply sulked. I 
had been very excited about Dr. Grill, his de- 
scription in the catalogues being specially fasci- 
nating, and no doubt I deserved the snubbing I 
got. “Never be excited, my dears, about any- 
thing,” shall be the advice I will give the three 
babies when the time comes to take them out to 
parties, “or, if you are, don’t show it. If by na- 
ture you are volcanoes, at least be only smol- 
dering ones. Don’t look pleased, don’t look in- 
terested, don’t, above all things, look eager. 
Calm indifference should be written on every 
feature of your faces. Never show that you like 
any one person, or any one thing. Be cool, 
languid, and reserved. If you don’t do as your 
mother tells you and are just gushing, frisky, 
young idiots, snubs will be your portion. If 
you do as she tells you, you’ll marry princes 
and live happily ever after.” 

95 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


Dr. Grill must be a German rose. In this 
part of the world the more you are pleased to 
see a person the less is he pleased to see you; 
whereas, if you are disagreeable, he will grow 
pleasant visibly, his countenance expanding in- 
to wider amiability the more your own is stiff 
and sour. But I was not prepared for that sort 
of thing in a rose, and was disgusted with Dr. 
Grill. He had the best place in the garden — 
warm, sunny, and sheltered ; his holes were pre- 
pared with the tenderest care ; he was given the 
most dainty mixture of compost, clay, and ma- 
nure; he was watered assiduously all through 
the drought when more willing flowers got 
nothing; and he refused to do anything but 
look black and shrivel. He did not die, but 
neither did he live — he just existed; and at the 
end of the summer not one of him had a scrap 
more shoot or leaf than when he was first put 
in in April. It would have been better if he 
had died straight away, for then I should have 
known what to do ; as it is, there he is still oc- 
cupying the best place, wrapped up carefully 
for the winter, excluding kinder roses, and 
probably intending to repeat the same conduct 
next year. Well, trials are the portion of man- 
96 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


kind, and gardeners have their share, and in any 
case it is better to be tried by plants than per- 
sons, seeing that with plants you know that it 
is you who are in the wrong, and with persons 
it is always the other way about — and who is 
there among us who has not felt the pangs of 
injured innocence, and known them to be griev- 
ous? 

I have two visitors staying with me, though 
I have done nothing to provoke such an inflic- 
tion, and had been looking forward to a happy 
little Christmas alone with the Man of Wrath 
and the babies. Faith decreed otherwise. Quite 
regularly, if I look forward to anything. Fate 
steps in and decrees otherwise; I don’t know 
why it should, but it does. I had not even in- 
vited these good ladies — like greatness on the 
modest, they were thrust upon me. One is 
Irais, the sweet singer of the summer, whom I 
love as she deserves, but of whom I certainly 
thought I had seen the last for at least a year, 
when she wrote and asked if I would have her 
over Christmas, as her husband was out of 
sorts, and she didn’t like him in that state. 
Neither do I like sick husbands, so, full of sym- 


97 


ELIZABETH AND HER QERMAH GARDEN. 


pathy, I begged her to come, and here she is. 
And the other is Minora. 

Why I have to have Minora I don’t know, for 
I was not even aware of her existence a fort- 
night ago. Then coming down cheerfully one 
morning to breakfast — it was the very day aft- 
er my return from England — I found a letter 
from an English friend, who up till then had 
been perfectly innocuous, asking me to befriend 
Minora. I read the letter aloud for the benefit 
of the Man of Wrath, who was eating Spick- 
gans, a delicacy much sought after in these 
parts. 

'‘Do, my dear Elizabeth,” wrote my friend, 
“take some notice , of the poor thing. She is 
studying art in Dresden, and has nowhere lit- 
erally to go for Christmas. She is very am- 
bitious and hardworking ” 

“Then,” interrupted the Man of Wrath, “she 
is not pretty. Only ugly girls work hard.” 

“ — and she is really very clever ” 

“I do not like clever girls, they are so 
stupid,” again interrupted the Man of Wrath. 
“ — and unless some kind creature like your- 
self takes pity on her she will be very lonely.” 
“Then let her be lonely.” 

98 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


"‘Her mother is my oldest friend, and would 
be greatly distressed to think that her daughter 
should be alone in a foreign town at such a sea- 
son.’’ 

‘‘I do not mind the distress of the mother.” 

“Oh, dear me,” I exclaimed impatiently, “I 
shall have to ask her to come !” 

“If you should be inclined,” the letter went 
on, “to play the good Samaritan, dear Eliza- 
beth, I am positive you would find Minora a 
bright, intelligent companion ” 

“Minora?” questioned the Man of Wrath. 

The April baby, who has had a nursery gov- 
erness of an altogether alarmingly zealous type 
attached to her person for the last six weeks, 
looked up from her bread and milk. 

“It sounds like islands,” she remarked pen- 
sively. 

The governess coughed. 

“Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” ex- 
plained her pupil. 

I looked at her severely. 

“If you are not careful, April,” I said, “you’ll 
be a genius when you grow up and disgrace 
your parents.” 

Miss Jones looked as though she did not like 
99 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH OARDEH. 


Germans. I am afraid she despises us because 
she thinks we are foreigners — an attitude of 
mind quite British and wholly to her credit ; but 
we, on the other hand, regard her as a for- 
eigner, which, of course, makes things very 
complicated. 

^^Shall I really have to have this strange 
girl?’’ I asked, addressing nobody in particular 
and not expecting a reply. 

‘‘You need not have her,” said the Man of 
Wrath composedly, “but you will. You will 
write to-day and cordially invite her, and when 
she has been here twenty-four hours you will 
quarrel with her. I know you, my dear.” 

“Quarrel! I? With a little art-student?” 

Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is per- 
petually scenting a scene, and is always ready 
to bring whole batteries of discretion and tact 
and good taste to bear on us, and seems to 
know we are disputing in an unseemly manner 
when we would never dream it ourselves but for 
the warning of her downcast eyes. I would 
take my courage in both hands and ask her to 
go, for besides this superfluity of discreet be- 
havior she is, although only nursery, much too 
zealous, and inclined to be always teaching and 
100 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


never playing; but, unfortunately, the April 
baby adores her and is sure there never was 
any one so beautiful before. She comes every 
day with fresh accounts of the splendors of her 
wardrobe, and feeling descriptions of her um- 
brellas and hats; and Miss Jones looks offend- 
ed and purses up her lips. In common with 
most governesses she has a little dark down on 
her upper lip, and the April baby appeared one 
day at dinner with her own decorated in faith- 
ful imitation, having achieved it after much 
struggling, with the aid of a lead pencil and un- 
bounded love. Miss Jones put her in the corner 
for impertinence. I wonder why governesses 
are so unpleasant. The Man of Wrath says it 
is because they are not married. Without ven- 
turing to differ entirely from the opinion of ex- 
perience, I would add that the strain of con- 
tinually having to set an example must surely 
be very great. It is much easier, and often 
more pleasant, to be a warning than an ex- 
ample, and governesses are but women, and 
women are sometimes foolish, and when you 
want to be foolish it must be annoying to have 
to be wise. 

Minora and Irais arrived yesterday together; 

101 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


or rather, when the carriage drove up, Irais got 
out of it alone^ and informed me that there 
was a strange girl on a bicycle a little way be- 
hind. I sent back the carriage to pick her up, 
for it was dusk and the roads are terrible. 

‘‘But why do you have strange girls here at 
all?” asked Irais rather peevishly, taking off 
her hat in the library before the fire, and other- 
wise making herself very much at home; “I 
don’t like them. I’m not sure that they’re not 
worse than husbands who are out of order. 
Who is she? She would bicycle from the sta- 
tion, and is, I am sure, the first woman who 
has done it. The little boys threw stones at 
her.” 

“Oh, my dear, that only shows the ignorance 
of the little boys! Never mind her. Let us 
have tea in peace before she comes.” 

“But we should be much happier without 
her,” she grumbled. “Weren’t we happy enough 
in the summer, Elizabeth — just you and I?” 

“Yes, indeed we were,” I answered heartily, 
putting my arms round her. The flame of my 
affection for Irais burns very brightly on the 
day of her arrival ; besides, this time I have pru- 
dently provided against her sinning with the 
102 


ELIZABETH AND HER QERMAN GARDEN. 


salt-cellars by ordering them to be handed 
round like vegetable dishes. We had finished 
tea and she had gone up to her room to dress 
before Minora and her bicycle were got here. I 
hurried out to meet her, feeling sorry for her, 
plungeddnto a circle of strangers at such a very 
personal season as Christmas. But she was 
not very shy; indeed, she was less shy than I 
was, and lingered in the hall, giving the servants 
directions to wipe the snow off the tires of her 
machine before she lent an attentive ear to my 
welcoming remarks. 

couldn't make your man understand me at 
the station,” she said at last, when her man 
was at rest about her bicycle; ‘‘I asked him 
how far it was, and what the roads were like, 
and he only smiled. Is he German? But of 
course he is — how odd that he didn't under- 
stand. You speak English very well — very well 
indeed, do you know.” 

By this time we were in the library, and she 
stood on the hearthrug warming her back 
while I poured her out some tea. 

'‘What a quaint room,” she remarked, look- 
ing round, "and the hall is so curious too. Very 
old, isn't it ? There's a lot of copy here.” 

103 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


The Man of Wrath, who had been in the hall 
on her arrival and had come in with us, began 
to look about on the carpet. ‘‘Copy?” he in- 
quired; “where's copy?" 

“Oh — material, you know, for a book. I'm 
just jotting down what strikes me in your coun- 
try, and when I have time shall throw it into 
book form." She spoke very loud, as English 
people always do to foreigners. 

“My dear," I said breathlessly to Irais, when 
I had got into her room and shut the door and 
Minora was safely in hers, “what do you think 
—she writes books !" 

“What — the bicycling girl?" 

“Yes — Minora — imagine it!" 

We stood and looked at each other with awe- 
struck faces. 

“How dreadful!" murmured Irais. “I never 
met a young girl who did that before." 

“She says this place is full of copy." 

“Full of what?" 

“That’s what you make books with.” 

“Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected! 
A strange girl is always a bore among good 
friends, but one can generally manage her. But 
a girl who writes books — why, it isn't respect- 
104 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


able ! And you can’t snub that sort of people ; 
they’re unsnubbable.” 

“Oh, but we’ll try !” I cried, with such heart- 
iness that we both laughed. 

The hall and the library struck Minora most; 
indeed, she lingered so long after dinner in the 
hall, which is cold, that the Man of Wrath put 
on his fur coat by way of a gentle hint. His 
hints are always gentle. 

She wanted to hear the whole story about the 
chapel and the nuns and Gustavus Adolphus, 
and pulling out a fat notebook began to take 
down what I said. I at once relapsed into 
silence. 

“Well?” she said. 

“That’s all.” 

“Oh, but you’ve only just begun.” 

“It doesn’t go any further. Won’t you come 
into the library?” 

In the library she again took up her stand 
before the fire and warmed herself, and we sat 
in a row and were cold. She has a wonder- 
fully good profile, which is irritating. The 
wind, however, is tempered to the shorn lamb 
by her eyes being set too closely together. 

Irais lit a cigarette, and leaning back in her 
105 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEH, 


chair contemplated her critically beneath her 
long eyelashes. '‘You are writing a book?” she 
asked presently. 

"Well — yes, I suppose I may say that I am. 
Just my impressions, you know, of your coun- 
try. Anything that strikes me as curious or 
amusing — I jot it down, and when I have time 
shall work it up into something, I dare say.” 

"Are you not studying painting?” 

"Yes, but I can’t study that forever. We 
have an English proverb : ‘Life is short and Art 
is long’ — too long, I sometimes think — and 
writing is a great relaxation when I am tired.” 

"What shall you call it?” 

"Oh, I thought of calling it ‘Journeyings in 
Germany.’ It sounds well, and would be cor- 
rect. Or ‘Jottings from German Journeyings’ 
— I haven’t quite decided yet which.” 

"By the author of ‘Prowls in Pomerania,’ you 
might add,” suggested Irais. 

"And ‘Drivel from Dresden,’ ” said I. 

"And ‘Bosh from Berlin,’ ” added Irais. 

Minora stared. "I don’t think those two last 
ones would do,” she said, "because it is not to 
be a facetious book. But your first one is rather 
a good title,” she added, looking at Irais and 
106 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


drawing out her notebook. ''1 think I’ll just 
jot that down.” 

“If you jot down all we say and then pub- 
lish it, will it still be your book?” asked Irais. 

But Minora was so busy scribbling that she 
did not hear. 

“And have you no suggestions to make, 
Sage?” asked Irais, turning to the Man of 
Wrath, who was blowing out clouds of smoke in 
silence. 

“Oh, do you call him Sage?” cried Minora; 
“and always in English?” 

Irais and I looked at each other. We knew 
what we did call him, and were afraid Minora 
would in time ferret it out and enter it in her 
notebook. The Man of Wrath looked none too 
well pleased to be alluded to under his very 
nose by our new guest as “him.” 

“Husbands are always sages,” said I gravely. 

“Though sages are not always husbands,” 
said Irais with equal gravity. “Sages and hus- 
bands — sage and husbands ” she went on 

musingly, “what does that remind you of. Miss 
Minora ?” 

“Oh, I know, — how stupid of me!” cried 
Minora eagerly, her pencil in mid-air and her 
107 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


brain clutching at the elusive recollection, ‘‘sage 
and, — why, — ^yes, — no, — yes, of course — oh,’' 
disappointedly, “but that’s vulgar— I can’t put 
it in.” 

“What is vulgar?” I asked. 

“She thinks sage and onions is vulgar,” said 
Irais languidly; “but it isn’t, it is very good.” 
She got up and walked to the piano, and, sitting 
down, began, after a little wandering over the 
keys, to sing. 

“Do you play?” I asked Minora. 

“Yes, but I am afraid I am rather out of 
practice.” 

I said no more. I know what that sort of 
playing is. 

When we were lighting our bedroom candles 
Minora began suddenly to speak in an un- 
known tongue. We stared. “What is the mat- 
ter with her?” murmured Irais. 

“I thought, perhaps,” said Minora in Eng- 
lish, “you might prefer to talk German, and 
as it is all the same to me what I talk ” 

“Oh, pray don’t trouble,” said Irais. “We 
like airing our English — don’t we, Elizabeth?” 

“I don’t want my German to get rusty, 


108 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


though/’ said Minora; “I shouldn’t like to for- 
get it.” 

“Oh, but isn’t there an English song,” said 
Irais, twisting her neck as she preceded us up- 
stairs — “ ' ’Tis folly to remember, ’tis wisdom 
to forget’?” 

“You are not nervous sleeping alone, I hope,” 
I said hastily. 

“What room is she in?” asked Irais. 

“No. 12.” 

“Oh! — do you believe in ghosts?” 

Minora turned pale. 

“What nonsense,” said I ; “we have no ghosts 
here. Good-night. If you want anything, mind 
you ring.” 

“And if you see anything curious in that 
room,” called Irais from her bedroom door, 
“mind you jot it down.” 

December 27. — It is the fashion, I believe, to 
regard Christmas as a bore of rather a gross 
description, and as a time when you are invited 
to overeat yourself, and pretend to be merry 
without just cause. As a matter of fact, it is 
one of the prettiest and most poetic institutions 
possible, if observed in the proper manner, anc}, 
J09 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAE GARDEE, 


after having been more or less unpleasant to 
everybody for a whole year it is a blessing to 
be forced on that one day to be amiable, and 
it is certainly delightful to be able to give pres- 
ents without being haunted by the conviction 
that you are spoiling the recipient, and will suf- 
fer for it afterward. Servants are only big chil- 
dren, and are made just as happy as children by 
little presents and nice things to eat, and, for 
days beforehand, every time the three babies go 
into the garden they expect to meet the Christ 
Child with His arms full of gifts. They firmly 
believe that it is thus their presents are brought, 
and it is such a charming idea that Christmas 
would be worth celebrating for its sake alone. 

As great secrecy is observed, the prepara- 
tions devolve entirely on me, and it is not very 
easy work, with so many people in our own 
house and on each of the farms, and all the chil- 
dren, big and little, expecting their share of hap- 
piness. The library is uninhabitable for several 
days before and after, as it is there that we have 
the trees and presents. All down one side are 
the trees, and the other three sides are lined 
with tables, a separate one for each person in 
the house. When the trees are lighted, and 
110 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


stand in their radiance shining down on the 
happy faces, I forget all the trouble it has been, 
and the number of times I have had to run up 
and down stairs, and the various aches in head 
and feet, and enjoy myself as much as anybody. 
First the June baby is ushered in, then the 
others and ourselves according to age, then the 
servants, then come the head inspector and his 
family, the other inspectors from the different 
farms, the mamsells, the bookkeepers and sec- 
retaries, and then all the children, troops and 
troops of them — the big ones leading the little 
ones by the hand and carrying the babies in 
their arms, and the mothers peeping round the 
door. As many as can get in stand in front of 
the trees, and sing two or three carols; then 
they are given their presents, and go off tri- 
umphantly, making room for the next batch. 
My three babies sang lustily too, whether they 
happened to know what was being sung or not. 
They had on white dresses in honor of the oc- 
casion, and the June baby was even arrayed in 
a low-necked and short-sleeved garment, after 
the manner of Teutonic infants, whatever the 
state of the thermometer. Her arms are like 
miniature prizefighter’s arms — I never saw such 
111 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


things; they are the pride and joy of her little 
nurse, who had tied them up with blue ribbons, 
and kept on kissing them. I shall certainly not 
be able to take her to balls when she grows up, 
if she goes on having arms like that. 

When they came to say good-night they were 
all very pale and subdued. The April baby had 
an exhausted-looking Japanese doll with her, 
which she said she was taking to bed, not be- 
cause she liked him, but because she was so 
sorry for him, he seemed so very tired. They 
kissed me absently, and went away, only the 
April baby glancing at the trees as she passed 
and making them a courtesy. 

^‘Good-by, trees,’' I heard her say; and then 
she made the Japanese doll bow to them, which 
he did, in a very languid and blase fashion. 
''You'll never see such trees again,” she told 
him, giving him a vindictive shake, ‘‘for you’ll 
be brokened long before next time.” 

She went out, but came back as though she 
had forgotten something. 

“Thank the Christkind so much. Mummy, 
won’t you, for all the lovely things He brought 
us. I suppose you’re writing to Him now, isn’t 
you?” 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


I cannot see that there was anything gross 
about our Christmas, and we were perfectly 
merry without any need to pretend, and for at 
least two days it brought us a little nearer to- 
gether, and made us kind. Happiness is so 
wholesome; it invigorates and warms me into 
piety far more effectually than any amount of 
trials and griefs, and an unexpected pleasure is 
the surest means of bringing me to my knees. 
In spite of the protestations of some peculiarly 
constructed persons that they are the better for 
trials, I don’t believe it. Such things must sour 
us, just as happiness must sweeten us, and 
make us kinder, and more gentle. And will 
anybody affirm that it behooves us to be more 
thankful for trials than for blessings? We were 
meant to be happy, and to accept all the hap- 
piness offered with thankfulness — indeed, we 
are none of us ever thankful enough, and yet 
we each get so much, so very much, more than 
we deserve. I know a woman — she stayed with 
me last summer — who rejoices grimly when 
those she loves suffer. She believes that it is 
our lot, and that it braces us and does us good, 
and she would shield no one from even unnec- 
essary pain; she weeps with the sufferer, but is 
113 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


convinced it is all for the best. Well, let her 
continue in her dreary beliefs; she has no gar- 
den to teach her the beauty and the happiness 
of holiness; nor does she in the least desire to 
possess one; her convictions have the sad gray 
coloring of the dingy streets and houses she 
lives among — the sad color of humanity in 
masses. Submission to what people call their 
“lot’' is simply ignoble. If your lot makes you 
cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take an- 
other ; strike out for yourself ; don’t listen to the 
shrieks of your relations, to their gibes or their 
entreaties; don’t let your own miscroscopic set 
prescribe your goings-out and comings-in ; 
don’t be afraid of public opinion in the shape of 
the neighbor in the next house, when all the 
world is before you, new and shining, and every- 
thing is possible, if you will only be energetic 
and independent and seize opportunity by the 
scruff of the neck. 

“To hear you talk,” said Irais, “no one would 
ever imagine that you dream away your days 
in a garden with a book, and that you never in 
your life seized anything by the scruff of its 
neck. And what is scruff? I hope I have not 


114 


ELIZABETH AED HER OERMAE QARDEE. 


got any on me” And she craned her neck be- 
fore the glass. 

She and Minora were going to help me deco- 
rate the trees, but very soon Irais wandered 
off to the piano, and Minora was tired and took 
up a book; so I called in Miss Jones and the 
babies, — it was Miss Jones' last public appear- 
ance, as I shall relate, — and after working for 
the best part of two days they were finished, 
and looked like lovely ladies in wide-spreading, 
sparkling petticoats, holding up their skirts 
with glittering fingers. Minora wrote a long 
description of them for a chapter of her book 
which is headed Noel — I saw that much, be- 
cause she left it open on the table while she 
went to talk to Miss Jones. They were fast 
friends from the very first, and though it is said 
to be natural to take to one’s own countrymen, 
I am unable altogether to sympathize with such 
a reason for sudden affection. 

“I wonder what they talk about?” I said to 
Irais yesterday, when there was no getting 
Minora to come to tea, so deeply was she en- 
gaged in conversation with Miss Jones. 

‘‘Oh, my dear, how can I tell ? Lovers, I sup- 


115 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEN, 


pose, or else they think they are clever, and 
then they talk rubbish.” 

“Well, of course. Minora thinks she is 
clever.” 

“I suppose she does. What does it matter 
what she thinks? Why does your governess 
look so gloomy? When I see her at luncheon 
I always imagine she must have just heard that 
somebody is dead. But she can’t hear that 
every day. What is the matter with her?” 

“I don’t think she feels quite as proper as 
she looks,” I said doubtfully ; I was forever try- 
ing to account for Miss Jones’ expression. 

“But that must be rather nice,” said Irais. 
“It would be awful for her if she felt exactly 
the same as she looks.” 

At that moment the door leading into the 
schoolroom opened softly, and the April baby, 
tired of playing, came in and sat down at my 
feet, leaving the door open; and this is what 
we heard Miss Jones saying: 

“Parents are seldom wise, and the strain the 
conscientious place upon themselves to appear 
so before their children and governess must be 
terrible. Nor are clergymen more pious than 
other men, yet they have continually to pose 
116 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEH, 


before their flock as such. As for governesses, 
Miss Minora, I know what I am saying when I 
affirm that there is nothing more intolerable 
than to have to be polite, and even humble, to 
persons whose weaknesses and follies are glar- 
ingly apparent in every word they utter, and to 
be forced by the presence of children and em- 
ployers to a dignity of manner in no way corre- 
sponding to one's feelings. The grave father 
of a family, who was probably one of the least 
respectable of bachelors, is an interesting study 
at his own table, where he is constrained to as- 
sume airs of infallibility merely because his chil- 
dren are looking at him. The fact of his being 
a parent does not endow him with any su- 
preme and sudden virtue; and I can assure 
you that among the eyes fixed upon him, not 
the least critical and amused are those . of the 
humble person who fills the post of governess.” 

''Oh, Miss Jones, how lovely!” we heard 
Minora say in accents of rapture, while we sat 
transfixed with horror at these sentiments. "Do 
you mind if I put that down in my book? You 
say it all so beautifully.” 

"Without a few hours of relaxation,” con- 
tinued Miss Jones, "of private indemnification 
117 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


for the toilsome virtues displayed in public, who 
could wade through days of correct behavior? 
There would be no reaction, no room for better 
impulses, no place for repentance. Parents, 
priests, and governesses would be in the situa- 
tion of a stout lady who never has a quiet mo- 
ment in which she can take off her corsets.” 

“My dear, what a firebrand !” whispered 
Irais. 

I got up and went in. They were sitting oil 
the sofa. Minora with clasped hands, gazing ad- 
miringly into Miss Jones’ face, which wore a 
very different expression from the one of sour 
and unwilling propriety I have been used to 
seeing. 

“May I ask you to come to tea?” I said to 
Minora. “And I should like to have the chil- 
dren a little while.” 

She got up very reluctantly, but I waited with 
the door open until she had gone in and the two 
babies had followed. They had been playing 
at stuffing each other’s ears with pieces of 
newspapers while Miss Jones provided Minora 
with noble thoughts for her work, and had to 
be tortured afterward with tweezers. I said 
nothing to Minora, but kept her with us till 
118 


ELIZABETH AND HER OERIHAN GARDEN. 


dinner-time, and this morning we went for a 
long sleigh-drive. When we came in to lunch 
there was no Miss Jones. 

“Is Miss Jones ill?’' asked Minora. 

“She is gone,” I said. 

“Gone?” 

“Did you never hear of such things as sick 
mothers?” asked Irais blandly; and we talked 
resolutely of something else. 

All the afternoon Minora has moped. She 
had found a kindred spirit, and it has been ruth- 
lessly torn from her arms, as kindred spirits so 
often are. It is enough to make her mope, and 
it is not her fault, poor thing, that she should 
have preferred the society of a Miss Jones to 
that of Irais and myself. 

At dinner Irais surveyed her with her head 
on one side. “You look so pale,” she said; “are 
you not well?” 

Minora raised her eyes heavily, with the 
patient air of one who likes to be thought a suf- 
ferer. “I have a slight headache,” she replied 
gently. 

“I hope you are not going to be ill,” said 
Irais with great concern, “because there is only 


119 


ELIZAB^ITH A^D HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


a cow-doctor to be had here, and though he 
means well I believe he is rather rough/' 

Minora was plainly startled. “But what do 
you do if you are ill?" she asked. 

“Oh, we are never ill," said I ; “the very 
knowledge that there would be no one to cure 
us seems to keep us healthy." 

“And if any one takes to her bed," said Irais, 
“Elizabeth always calls in the cow-doctor." 

Minora was silent. She feels, I am sure, that 
she has got into a part of the world peopled sole- 
ly by barbarians, and that the only civilized crea- 
ture besides herself has departed and left her at 
our mercy. Whatever her reflections may be 
her symptoms are visibly abating. 

January i. — The service on New Year’s Eve 
is the only one in the whole year that in the 
least impresses me in our little church, and then 
the very bareness and ugliness of the place and 
the ceremonial produce an effect that a snug 
service in a well-lit church never would. Last 
night we took Irais and Minora, and drove the 
three lonely miles in a sleigh. It was pitch- 
dark, and blowing great guns. We sat wrapped 


130 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


Up to our eyes in furs, and as mute as a fu- 
neral procession. 

“We are going to the burial of our last year’s 
sins,” said Irais, as we started; and there cer- 
tainly was a funereal sort of feeling in the air. 
Up in our gallery pew we tried to decipher our 
chorales by the light of the spluttering tallow 
candles stuck in holes in the woodwork, the 
flames wildly blown about by the draughts. The 
wind banged against the windows in great 
gusts, screaming louder than the organ, and 
threatening to blow out the agitated lights al- 
together. The parson in his gloomy pulpit, sur- 
rounded by a framework of dusty carved angels, 
took on an awful appearance of menacing Au- 
thority as he raised his voice to make himself 
heard above the clatter. Sitting there in the 
dark, I felt very small, and solitary, and de- 
fenseless, alone in a great, big, black world. 
The church was as cold as a tomb ; some of the 
candles guttered and went out; the parson in 
his black robe spoke of death and judgment; I 
thought I heard a child’s voice screaming, and 
could hardly believe it was only the wind, and 
felt uneasy and full of forebodings ; all my faith 
and philosophy deserted me, and I had a horrid 
121 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEH, 


feeling that I should probably be well punished, 
though for what I had no precise idea. If it 
had not been so dark, and if the wind had not 
howled so despairingly, I should have paid lit- 
tle attention to the threats issuing from the pul- 
pit ; but, as it was, I fell to making good resolu- 
tions. This is always a bad sign — only those 
who break them make them; and if you simply 
do as a matter of course that which is right as it 
comes, any preparatory resolving to do so be- 
comes completely superfluous. I have for some 
years past left off making them on New Year’s 
Eve, and only the gale happening as it did re- 
duced me to doing so last night ; for I have long 
since discovered that, though the year and the 
resolutions may be new, I myself am not, and 
it is worse than useless putting new wine into 
old bottles. 

‘‘But I am not an old bottle,” said Irais in- 
dignantly, when I held forth to her to the above 
effect a few hours later in the library, restored 
to all my philosophy by the warmth and light, 
“and I find my resolutions carry me very nicely 
into the spring. I revise them at the end of 
each month, and strike out the unnecessary 




ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


ones. By the end of April they have been so 
severely revised that there are none left.” 

“There, you see I am right; if you were not 
an old bottle your new contents would grad- 
ually arrange themselves amiably as a part of 
you, and the practice of your resolutions would 
lose its bitterness by becoming a habit.” 

She shook her head. “Such things never 
lose their bitterness,” she said, “and that is why 
I don’t let them cling to me right into the sum- 
mer. When May comes I give myself up to 
jollity with all the rest of the world, and am 
too busy being happy to bother about anything 
I may have resolved when the days were cold 
and dark.” 

“And that is just why I love you,” I thought. 
She often says what I feel. 

“I wonder,” she went on after a pause, 
“whether men ever make resolutions?” 

“I don’t think they do. Only women indulge 
in such luxuries. It is a nice sort of feeling, 
when you have nothing else to do, giving way to 
endless grief and penitence, and steeping your- 
self to the eyes in contrition; but it is silly. 
Why cry over things that are done? Why do 
naughty things at all, if you are going to repent 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


afterward? Nobody is naughty unless they like 
being naughty; and nobody ever really repents 
unless they are afraid they are going to be 
found out.’^ 

“By ‘nobody' of course you mean women,” 
said Irais. 

“Naturally; the terms are synonymous. Be- 
sides, men generally have the courage of their 
opinions.” 

“I hope you are listening. Miss Minora,” said 
Irais in the amiably polite tone she assumes 
whenever she speaks to that young person. 

It was getting on toward midnight, and we 
were sitting round the fire, waiting for the New 
Year, and sipping Gluhwein, prepared at a 
small table by the Man of Wrath. It was hot, 
and sweet, and rather nasty, but it is proper to 
drink it on this one night, so of course we did. 

Minora does not like either Irais or myself. 
We very soon discovered that, and laugh about 
it when we are alone together. I can under- 
stand her disliking Irais, but she must be a per- 
verse creature not to like me. Irais has poked 
fun at her, and I have been, I hope, very kind ; 
yet we are bracketed together in her black 
books. It is also apparent that she looks upon 
124 


ELIZABETH AND HER HERMAN GARDEN. 


the Man of Wrath as an interesting example of 
an ill-used and misunderstood husband, and 
she is disposed to take him under her wing and 
defend him on all occasions against us. He 
never speaks to her ; he is at all times a man of 
few words, but, as far as Minora is concerned, 
he might have no tongue at all, and sits sphinx- 
like and impenetrable while she takes us to 
task about some remark of a profane nature 
that we may have addressed to him. One 
night, some days after her arrival, she devel- 
oped a skittishness of manner which has since 
disappeared, and tried to be playful with him; 
but you might as well try to be playful with 
a graven image. The wife of one of the serv- 
ants had just produced a boy, the first after a 
series of five daughters, and at dinner we drank 
the health of all parties concerned, the Man of 
Wrath making the happy father drink a glass 
off at one gulp, his heels well together in mili- 
tary fashion. Minora thought the incident 
typical of German manners, and not only made 
notes about it, but joined heartily in the health- 
drinking, and afterward grew skittish. 

She proposed, first of all to teach us a dance 
called, I think, the Washington Post, and which 
125 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEN, 


was, she said, much danced in England; and, 
to induce us to learn, she played the tune to us 
on the piano. We remained untouched by its 
beauties, each buried in an easy-chair toasting 
our toes at the fire. Among those toes were 
those of the Man of Wrath, who sat peaceably 
reading a book and smoking. Minora volun- 
teered to show us the steps, and as we still did 
not move, danced solitary behind our chairs. 
Irais did not even turn her head to look, and I 
was the only one amiable or polite enough to 
do so. Do I deserve to be placed in Minora’s 
list of disagreeable people side by side with 
Irais? Certainly not. Yet I most surely am. 

“It wants the music, of course,” observed 
Minora breathlessly, darting in and out be- 
tween the chairs, apparently addressing me, but 
glancing at the Man of Wrath. 

No answer from anybody. 

“It is such a pretty dance,” she panted again, 
after a few more gyrations. 

No answer. 

“And is all the rage at home.” 

No answer. 

“Do let me teach you. Won’t you try, Herr 
Sage?” 


1^6 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEE, 


She went up to him and dropped him a little 
courtesy. It is thus she always addresses him, 
entirely oblivious to the fact, so patent to every 
one else, that he resents it. 

‘‘Oh, come, put away that tiresome old 
book,’’ she went on gayly, as he did not move; 
“I am certain it is only some dry agricultural 
work that you just nod over. Dancing is much 
better for you.’" 

Irais and I looked at one another quite 
frightened. I am sure we both turned pale 
when the unhappy girl actually laid hold forci- 
bly of his book, and, with a playful little shriek, 
ran away with it into the next room, hugging 
it to her bosom and looking back roguishly 
over her shoulder at him as she ran. There was 
an awful pause. We hardly dared raise our 
eyes. Then the Man of Wrath got up slowly, 
knocked the ashes off the end of his cigar, 
looked at his watch, and went out at the op- 
posite door into his own rooms, where he stayed 
for the rest of the evening. She has never, 
I must say, been skittish since. 

‘T hope you are listening. Miss Minora,” 
said Irais, “because this sort of conversation is 
likely to do you good.” 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


‘‘I always listen when people talk sensibly,” 
replied Minora, stirring her grog. 

Irais glanced at her with slightly doubtful 
eyebrows. “Do you agree with our hostess' 
description of women?" she asked after a 
pause. 

“As nobodies? No, of course I do not." 

“Yet she is right. In the eye of the law we 
are literally nobodies in our country. Did you 
know that women are forbidden to go to politi- 
cal meetings here?" 

“Really?" Out came the notebook. 

“The law expressly forbids the attendance at 
such meetings of women, children, and idiots." 

“Children and idiots — I understand that," 
said Minora; “but women — and classed with 
children and idiots?" 

“Classed with children and idiots," repeated 
Irais, gravely nodding her head. “Did you 
know that the law forbids females of any age 
to ride on the top of omnibuses or tramcars?" 

“Not really?" 

“Do you know why?" 

“I can't imagine." 

“Because in going up and down the stairs 


128 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


those inside might perhaps catch a glimpse of 
the stocking covering their ankles/" 

‘‘But what "" 

“Did you know that the morals of the Geir- 
man public are in such a shaky condition that 
a glimpse of that sort would be fatal to them?"" 

“But I don"t see how a stocking "" 

“With stripes round it,"" said Irais. 

“And darns in it,"" I added. 

“ — could possibly be pernicious?’" 

“ ‘The Pernicious Stocking ; or. Thoughts on 
the Ethics of Petticoats," "" said Irais. “Put that 
down as the name of your next book on Ger- 
many."" 

“I never know,"" complained Minora, letting 
her notebook fall, “whether you are in earnest 
or not."" 

“Don’t you?” said Irais sweetly. 

“Is it true,” appealed Minora to the Man of 
Wrath, busy with his lemons in tfiC back- 
ground, “that your law classes women with 
children and idiots?” 

“Certainly,” he answered promptly, ^‘and a 
very proper classification too.” 

We all looked blank. “That’s rude/ said I 
at last. 


1^9 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


“Truth is always rude, my dear/’ he replied 
complacently. Then he added, “If I were com- 
missioned to draw up a new legal code, and 
had previously enjoyed the privilege, as I have 
been doing lately, of listening to the conversa- 
tion of you three young ladies, I should make 
precisely the same classification.” 

Even Minora was incensed at this. 

“You are telling us in the most unvarnished 
manner that we are idiots,” said Irais. 

“Idiots? No, no, by no means. But children 
— nice little agreeable children. I very much 
like to hear you talk together. It is all so 
young and fresh what you think and what you 
believe, and not of the least consequence to 
any one.” 

“Not of the least consequence?” cried Mi- 
nora. “What we believe is of very great con- 
sequence indeed to us.” 

“Are you jeering at our beliefs?” inquired 
Irais sternly. 

“Not for worlds. I would not on any ac- 
count disturb or change your pretty little be- 
liefs. It is your chief charm that you always 
believe ever)rthing. How desperate would our 
case be if young ladies only believed facts, and 
180 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAIN QARDEE, 


never accepted another person’s assurance, but 
preferred the evidence of their own eyes ! They 
would have no illusions, and a woman without 
illusions is the dreariest and most difficult thing 
to manage possible.” 

“Thing?” protested Irais. 

The Man of Wrath, usually so silent, make.* 
up for it from time to time by holding forth at 
unnecessary length. He took up his stand now 
with his back to the fire, and a glass of Gluh- 
wein in his hand. Minora had hardly heard his 
voice before, so quiet has he been since she 
came, and sat with her pencil raised, ready to 
fix forever the wisdom that should flow from 
his lips. 

“What would become of poetry if women be- 
came so sensible that they turned a deaf ear to 
the poetic platitudes of love? That love does 
indulge in platitudes I suppose you will ad- 
mit.” He looked at Irais. 

“Yes, they all say exactly the same thing,” 
she acknowledged. 

“Who could murmur pretty speeches on the 
beauty of a common sacrifice, if the listener’s 
want of imagination was such as to enable her 


131 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


only to distinguish one victim in the picture, 
and that one herself?’' 

Minora took that down word for word — 
much good may it do her. 

“Who would be brave enough to affirm that if 
refused he will die, if his assurances merely 
elicit a recommendation to diet himself and take 
plenty of outdoor exercise? Women are re- 
sponsible for such lies, because they believe 
them. Their amazing vanity makes them swal- 
low flattery so gross that it is an insult, and 
men will always be ready to tell the precise 
number of lies that a woman is ready to listen 
to. Who indulges more recklessly in glowing 
exaggerations than the lover who hopes, and 
has not yet obtained? He will, like the nightin- 
gale, sing with unceasing modulations, display 
all his talent, untiringly repeat his sweetest 
notes, until he has what he wants, when his 
song, like the nightingale’s, immediately ceases, 
never again to be heard.” 

“Take that down,” murmured Irais aside to 
Minora — unnecessary advice, for her pencil 
was scribbling as fast as it could. 

“A woman’s vanity is so immeasurable that, 
after having had ninety-nine object-lessons in 
13 ^ 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


the difference between promise and perform- 
ance and the emptiness of pretty speeches, the 
beginning of the hundredth will find her lend- 
ing the same willing and enchanted ear to the 
eloquence of flattery as she did on the occasion 
of the first. What can the exhortations of the 
strong-minded sister, who has never had these 
experiences, do for such a woman? It is use- 
less to tell her she is man’s victim, that she is 
his plaything, that she is cheated, downtrodden, 
kept under, laughed at, shabbily treated in 
every way — that is not a true statement of the 
case. She is simply the victim of her own van- 
ity, and against that, against ;he belief in her 
own fascinations, against the very part of her- 
self that gives all the color to her life, who shall 
expect a woman to take up arms?” 

“Are you so vain, Elizabeth?” inquired Irais 
with a shocked face, “and had you lent a will- 
ing ear to the blandishments of ninety-nine be- 
fore you reached your final destiny?” 

“I am one of the sensible ones, I suppose,” I 
replied, “for nobody ever wanted me to listen 
to blandishments.” 

Minora sighed. 

“I [ike to hear you talk together about the 
133 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


position of women/’ he went on, ‘^and wonder 
when you will realize that they hold exactly the 
position they are fitted for. As soon as they 
are fit to occupy a better, no power on earth 
will be able to keep them out of it. Meanwhile, 
let me warn you that, as things now are, only 
strong-minded women wish to see you the 
equals of men, and the strong-minded are in- 
variably plain. The pretty ones would rather 
see men their slaves than their equals.” 

''You know,” said Irais, frowning, "that I 
consider myself strong-minded.” 

"And never rise till lunch-time?” 

Irais blushed. Although I don’t approve of 
such conduct, it is very convenient in more 
ways than one ; I get through my housekeeping 
undisturbed, and, whenever she is disposed to 
lecture me, I begin about this habit of hers. 
Her conscience must be terribly stricken on the 
point, for she is by no means as a rule given to 
meekness. 

"A woman without vanity would be unattack- 
able,” resumed the Man of Wrath. "When a 
girl enters that downward path that leads to 
ruin, she is led solely by her own vanity; for 
in these days of policemen no young woman 
134 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAV GARDEN. 


can be forced against her will from the path 
of virtue, and the cries of the injured are never 
heard until the destroyed begins to express his 
penitence for having destroyed. If his passion 
could remain at white-heat and he could con- 
tinue to feed her ear with the protestations she 
loves, no principles of piety or virtue would 
disturb the happiness of his companion; for a 
mournful experience teaches that piety begins 
only where passion ends, and that principles 
are strongest where temptations are most rare.’' 

“But what has all this to do with us?” I 
inquired severely. 

“You are displeased at our law classing you 
as it does, and I merely wish to justify it,” he 
answered. “Creatures who habitually say yes 
to everything a man proposes, when it is so 
often fatal, are plainly not responsible beings.” 

“I shall never say it to you again, my dear 
man,” I said. 

“And not only that fatal weakness,” he con- 
tinued, “but what is there, candidly, to distin- 
guish you from children? You are older, but 
not wiser — really not so wise, for with years 
you lose the common sense you had as chil- 


135 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


dren. Have you ever heard a group of women 
talking reasonably together?” 

“Yes — we do!” Irais and I cried in a breath. 

“It has interested me,” went on the Man of 
Wrath, “in my idle moments, to listen to their 
talk. It amused me to hear the malicious lit- 
tle stories they told to their best friends who 
were absent, to note the spiteful little digs they 
gave their best friends who were present, to 
watch the utter incredulity with which they lis- 
tened to the tale of some other woman’s con- 
quests, the radiant good faith they displayed in 
connection with their own, the instant collapse 
into boredom if some topic of so-called general 
interest, by some extraordinary chance, were 
introduced.” 

“You must have belonged to a particularly 
nice set,” remarked Irais. 

“And as for politics,” he said, “I have never 
heard them mentioned among women.” 

“Children and idiots are not interested in 
such things,” I said. 

“And we are much too frightened of being 
put in prison,” said Irais. 

“In prison?” echoed Minora. 

“Don’t you know,” said Irais, turning to 
136 


ELIZABETH AHD HER OERMAH GARDEN. 


her, “that if you talk about such things here 
you run a great risk of being imprisoned?” 

“But why?” 

“But why? Because, though you yourself 
may have meant nothing but what was inno- 
cent, your words may have suggested some- 
thing less innocent to the evil minds of your 
hearers ; and then the law steps in, and calls it 
dolus eventualis, and everybody says how 
dreadful, and off you go to prison and are pun- 
ished as you deserve to be.” 

Minora looked mystified. 

“That is not, however, your real reason for 
not discussing them,” said the Man of Wrath; 
“they simply do not interest you. Or it may 
be that you do not consider your female friends’ 
opinions worth listening to, for you certainly 
display an astonishing thirst for information 
when male politicians are present. I have seen 
a pretty young woman, hardly in her twenties, 
sitting a whole evening drinking in the doubt- 
ful wisdom of an elderly political star, with 
every appearance of eager interest. He was a 
bimetallic star, and was giving her whole 
pamphlets full of information.” 

“She wanted to make up to him for some 
137 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEH. 

reason,” said Irais, ‘‘and got him to explain his 
hobby to her, and he was silly enough to be 
taken in. Now, which was the sillier in that 
case ?” 

She threw herself back in her chair and looked 
up defiantly, beating her foot impatiently on the 
carpet. 

“She wanted to be thought clever,” said the 
Man of Wrath. “What puzzled me,” he went 
on musingly, “was that she went away appar- 
ently as serene and happy as when she came. 
The explanation of the principles of bimetal- 
lism produce, as a rule, a contrary effect.” 

“Why, she hadn’t been listening,” cried Irais, 
“and your simple star had been making a fine 
goose of himself the whole evening. 

*^Prattle, prattle, simple star, 

Bimetallic, wunderbar. 

Though you* re given to describe 
Woman as a dummes Weib, 

You yourself are sillier far. 

Prattling, bimetallic star!** 

“No doubt she had understood very little,” 
said the Man of Wrath, taking no notice of this 
effusion. 


138 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH HARDER, 


‘‘And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t under- 
stood much either.” Irais was plainly irri- 
tated. 

“Your opinion of women,” said Minora in a 
very small voice, “is not a high one. But, in 
the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no 
one could take her place?” 

“If you are thinking of hospital nurses,” I 
said, “I must tell you that I believe he married 
chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a 
strange woman to nurse him when he is sick.” 

“But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way 
her illusions were being knocked about, “the 
sickroom is surely the very place of all others 
in which a woman’s gentleness and tact are 
most valuable.” 

“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of 
Wrath. “I have never met those qualities in the 
professional nurse. According to my experi- 
ence, she is a disagreeable person who finds 
in private nursing exquisite opportunities for 
asserting her superiority over ordinary and 
prostrate mankind. I know of no more humil- 
iating position for a man than to be in bed hav- 
ing his feverish brow soothed by a sprucely 
dressed strange woman, bristling with starch 
139 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


and spotlessness. He would give half his in- 
come for his clothes, and probably the other 
half if she would leave him alone, and go away 
altogether. He feels her superiority through 
every pore; he never realized how absolutely 
inferior he is; he is abjectly polite, and con- 
temptibly conciliatory; if a friend comes to see 
him, he eagerly praises her in case she should 
be listening behind the screen; he cannot call 
his soul his own, and, what is far more intoler- 
able, neither is he sure that his body really be- 
longs to him ; he has read of ministering angels 
and the light touch of a woman’s hand, but the 
day on which he can ring for his servant and 
put on his socks in private fills him with the 
same sort of wildness of joy that he felt as a 
homesick schoolboy at the end of his first 
term.” 

Minora was silent. Irais' foot was livelier 
than ever. The Man of Wrath stood smiling 
blandly upon us. You can’t argue with a per- 
son so utterly convinced of his infallibility that 
he won’t even get angry with you; so we sat 
round and said nothing. 

*Tf,” he went on, addressing Irais, who looked 
rebellious, '‘you doubt the truth of my re- 
140 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


marks, and still cling to the old poetic notion of 
noble, self-sacrificing women tenderly helping 
the patient over the rough places on the road 
to death or recovery, let me beg you to try for 
yourself, next time any one in your house is 
ill, whether the actual fact in any way corre- 
sponds to the picturesque belief. The angel 
who is to alleviate our sufferings comes in such 
a questionable shape, that to the unimaginative 
she appears merely as an extremely self-confi- 
dent young woman, wisely concerned first of 
all in securing her personal comfort, much 
given to complaints about her food and to help- 
lessness where she should be helpful, possess- 
ing an extraordinary capacity for fancying her- 
self slighted, or not regarded as the superior 
being she knows herself to be, morbidly anx- 
ious lest the servant should, by some mistake, 
treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish if 
the patient gives more trouble than she had 
expected, intensely injured and disagreeable if 
he is made so courageous by his wretchedness 
as to wake her during the night — an act of 
desperation of which I was guilty once, and 
once only. Oh, these good women ! What sane 
man wants to have to do with angels? And 
141 


ELIZABETH AHD HER OEBMAH GARDEN, 


especially do we object to having them about 
us when we are sick and sorry, v'^hen we feel 
in every fiber what poor things we are, and 
when all our fortitude is needed to enable us to 
bear our temporary inferiority patiently, with- 
out being forced besides to assurne an attitude 
of eager and groveling politeness toward the 
angel in the house/’ 

There was a pause. 

'T didn’t know you could talk so much. 
Sage,” said Irais at length. 

“What would you have women do, then?” 
asked Minora meekly. Irais began to beat her 
foot up and down again — what did it matter 
what Men of Wrath would have us do? “There 
are not,” continued Minora, blushing, “hus- 
bands enough for every one, and the rest must 
do something.” 

“Certainly,” replied the oracle. “Study the 
art of pleasing by dress and manner as long as 
you are of an age to interest us, and above all, 
let all women, pretty and plain, married and 
single, study the art of cookery. If you are an 
artist in the kitchen you will always be es- 
teemed.” 

I sat very still. Every German woman, even 
142 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEH. 

the wayward Irais, has learned to cook; I seem 
to have been the only one who was naughty 
and wouldn't. 

“Only be careful," he went on, “in studying 
both arts, never to forget the great truth that 
dinner precedes blandishments and not blan- 
dishments dinner. A man must be made com- 
fortable before he will make love to you; and 
though it is true that if you offered him a 
choice between Spickgans and kisses, he would 
say he would take both, yet he would invariably 
begin with the Spickgans, and allow the kisses 
to wait." 

At this I got up, and Irais followed my ex- 
ample. “Your cynicism is disgusting," I said 
icily. 

“You two are always exceptions to anything 
I may say," he said, smiling amiably. 

He stooped and kissed Irais' hand. She is 
inordinately vain of her hands, and says her 
husband married her for their sake, which I can 
quite believe. I am glad they are on her and 
not on Minora, for if Minora had had them I 
should have been annoyed. Minora's are bony, 
with chilly-looking knuckles, ignored nails, and 
too much wrist. I feel very well disposed to- 
143 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEH. 


ward her when my eye falls on them. She put 
one forward now, evidently thinking it would 
be kissed too. 

''Did you know,” said Irais, seeing the move- 
ment, "that it is the custom here to kiss wom- 
en's hands?” 

"But only married women's,” I added, not 
desiring her to feel out of it, "never young 
girls'.” 

She drew it in again. "It is a pretty custom,” 
she said with a sigh; and pensively inscribed it 
in her book. 

January 15, — The bills for my roses and 
bulbs and other last year's horticultural indul- 
gences were all on the table when I came down 
to breakfast this morning. They rather fright- 
ened me. Gardening is expensive, I find, when 
it has to be paid for out of one's own private 
pin-money. The Man of Wrath does not in the 
least want roses, or flowering shrubs, or plan- 
tations, or new paths, and therefore, he asks, 
why should he pay for them? So he does not 
and I do, and I have to make up for it by not 
indulging all too riotously in new clothes, which 
is no doubt very chastening. I certainly prefer 
144 


ELIZABETB AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


buying new rose trees to new dresses, if I can- 
not comfortably have both; and I see a time 
coming when the passion for my garden will 
have taken such a hold on me that I shall not 
only entirely cease buying more clothes, but be- 
gin to sell those that I already have. The gar- 
den is so big that everything has to be bought 
wholesale; and I fear I shall not be able to 
go on much longer with only one man and a 
stork, because the more I plant the more there 
will be to water in the inevitable drought, and 
the watering is a serious consideration when it 
means going backward and forward all day long 
to a pump near the house, with a little water- 
cart. People living in England, in almost per- 
petual mildness and moisture, don’t really 
know what a drought is. If they have some 
weeks of cloudless weather, it is generally pre- 
ceded and followed by good rains ; but we have 
perhaps an hour’s shower every week, and then 
comes a month or six weeks’ drought. The soil 
is very light, and dries so quickly that, after the 
heaviest thunder-shower, I can walk over any 
of my paths in my thin shoes ; and to keep the 
garden even moderately damp it should pour 
with rain regularly every day for three hours. 

145 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


My only means of getting water is to go to the 
pump near the house, or to the little stream 
that forms my eastern boundary, and the little 
stream dries up too unless there has been rain, 
and it is at the best of times difficult to get at, 
having steep banks covered with forget-me- 
nots. I possess one moist, peaty bit of ground, 
and that is to be planted with silver birches in 
imitation of the Hirschwald, and is to be car- 
peted between the birches with flaming azaleas. 
All the rest of my soil is sandy — the soil for 
pines and acacias, but not the soil for roses ; yet 
see what love will do — there are more roses in 
my garden than any other flower! Next spring 
the bare places are to be filled with trees that I 
have ordered; pines behind the delicate acacias 
and startling mountain-ashes, oaks, copper- 
beeches, maples, larches, juniper trees — was it 
not Elijah who sat down to rest under a juniper 
tree? I have often wondered how he managed 
to get under it. It is a compact little tree, not 
more than two or three yards high here, and all 
closely squeezed up together. Perhaps they 
grew more aggressively where he was. By the 
time the babies have grown old and disagreeable 
it will be very pretty here, and then possibly 
146 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


they won’t like it; and, if they have inherited 
the Man of Wrath’s indifference to gardens, 
they will let it run wild and leave it to return to 
the state in which I found it. Or perhaps their 
three husbands will refuse to live in it, or to 
come to such a lonely place at all, and then of 
course its fate is sealed. My only comfort is 
that husbands don’t flourish in the desert, and 
that the three will have to wait a long time be- 
fore enough are found to go round. Mothers 
tell me that it is a dreadful business finding one 
husband ; how much more painful, then, to have 
to look for three at once ! — the babies are so 
nearly the same age that they only just escaped 
being twins. But I won’t look. I can imagine 
nothing more uncomfortable than a son-in-law, 
and besides, I don’t think a husband is at all a 
good thing for a girl to have. I shall do my 
best in the years at my disposal to train them so 
to love the garden, and outdoor life, and even 
farming, that, if they have a spark of their 
mother in them, they will want and ask for 
nothing better. My hope of success is, how- 
ever, exceedingly small, and there is probably a 
fearful period in store for me when I shall be 
taken every day during the winter to the dis- 
147 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


tant towns to balls — a poor old mother shiver- 
ing in broad daylight in her party gown, and 
being made to start after an early lunch and 
not getting home till breakfast time next morn- 
ing. Indeed, they have already developed an 
alarming desire to go to “partings” as they call 
them, the April baby announcing her intention 
of beginning to do so when she is twelve. “Are 
you twelve, Mummy?” she asked. 

The gardener is leaving on the first of April, 
and I am trying to find another. It is grievous 
changing so often — in two years I shall have 
had three — ^because at each change a great part 
of my plants and plans necessarily suffers. 
Seeds get lost, seedlings are not pricked out in 
time, places already sown are planted with 
something else, and there is confusion out of 
doors and despair in my heart. But he was to 
have married the cook, and the cook saw a 
ghost and immediately left, and he is going aft- 
er her as soon as he can, and meanwhile is 
wasting visibly away. What she saw was doors 
that are locked opening with a great clatter all 
by themselves on the hinge-side, and then 
somebody invisible cursed at her. These phe- 
nomena now go by the name of “the ghost.” 
148 


ELIZABEfn AND MER GERMAN GARDEN. 


She asked to be allowed to leave at once, as 
she had never been in a place where there was 
a ghost before. I suggested that she should 
try and get used to it ; but she thought it would 
be wasting time, and she looked so ill that I let 
her go, and the garden has to suffer. I don’t 
know why it should be given to cooks to see 
such interesting things and withheld from me, 
but I have had two others since she left, and 
they both have seen the ghost. Minora grows 
very silent as bedtime approaches, and relents 
toward Irais and myself; and, after having 
shown us all day how little she approves us, 
when the bedroom candles are brought she 
quite begins to cling. She has once or twice 
anxiously inquired whether Irais is sure she 
does not object to sleeping alone. 

“If you are at all nervous I will come and 
keep you company,” she said; “I don’t mind at 
all, I assure you.” 

But Irais is not to be taken in by such simple 
wiles, and has told me she would rather sleep 
with fifty ghosts than with one Minora. 

Since Miss Jones was so unexpectedly called 
away to her parent’s bedside I have seen a good 
deal of the babies; and it is so nice without a 
149 


ELIZABETH AHD HER OERMAH GARDEH. 


governess that I would put off engaging an- 
other for a year or two, if it were not that I 
should in so doing come within the reach of the 
arm of the law, which is what every German 
spends his life in trying to avoid. The April 
baby will be six next month, and, after her sixth 
birthday is passed, we are liable at any moment 
to receive a visit from a school inspector, who 
will inquire curiously into the state of her edu- 
cation, and, if it is not up to the required stand- 
ard, all sorts of fearful things might happen to 
the guilty parents, probably beginning with 
fines, and going on crescendo to dungeons if, 
owing to gaps between governesses and dif- 
ficulties in finding the right one, we persisted 
in our evil courses. Shades of the prison- 
house begin to close here upon the growing 
boy, and prisons compass the Teuton about on 
every side all through life to such an extent 
that he has to walk very delicately indeed if he 
would stay outside them and pay for their main- 
tenance. Cultured individuals do not, as a rule, 
neglect to teach their offspring to read, and 
write, and say their prayers, and are apt to re- 
sent the intrusion of an examining inspector in- 
to their homes ; but it does not much matter aft- 
150 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAN GARDEN. 

er all, and I dare say it is very good for us to 
be worried; indeed, a philosopher of my ac- 
quaintance declares that people who are not 
regularly and properly worried are never any 
good for anything. In the eye of the law we are 
all sinners, and every man is held to be guilty 
until he has proved that he is innocent. 

Minora has seen so much of the babies that, 
after vainly trying to get out of their way for 
several days, she thought it better to resign her- 
self, and make the best of it by regarding them 
as copy, and using them to fill a chapter in her 
book. So she took to dogging their footsteps 
wherever they went, attended their uprisings 
and their lyings down, engaged them, if she 
could, in intelligent conversation, went with 
them into the garden to study their ways when 
they were sleighing, drawn by a big dog, and 
generally made their lives a burden to them. 
This went on for three days, and then she set- 
tled down to write the result with the Man of 
Wrath^s typewriter, borrowed whenever her 
notes for any chapter have reached the state of 
ripeness necessary for the process she de- 
scribes as “throwing into form."’ She writes 


151 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


everything with a typewriter, even her private 
letters. 

“Don’t forget to put in something about a 
mother’s knee,” said Irais; “you can’t write ef- 
fectively about children without that.” 

“Oh, of course I shall mention that,” replied 
Minora. 

“And pink toes,” I added. “There are al- 
ways toes, and they are never anything but 
pink.” 

“I have that somewhere,” said Minora, turn- 
ing over her notes. 

“But, after all, babies are not a German spe- 
cialty,” said Irais, “and I don’t quite see why 
you should bring them into a book of German 
travels. Elizabeth’s babies have each got the 
fashionable number of arms and legs, and are 
exactly the same as English ones.” 

“Oh, but they can’t be just the same, you 
know,” said Minora, looking worried. “It must 
make a difference living here in this place, and 
eating such odd things, and never having a doc- 
tor, and never being ill. Children who have 
never had measles and those things can’t be 
quite the same as other children ; it must all be 
in their systems and can’t get out for some rea^ 
152 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH QABDEH, 


son or-other. And a child brought up on chick- 
en and rice-pudding must be different to a child 
that eats Spickgans and liver sausages. And 
they are different; I can’t tell in what way, but 
they certainly are; and I think if I steadily de- 
scribe them from the materials I have collected 
the last three days, I may perhaps hit on the 
points of difference.” 

“Why bother about points of difference?” 
asked Irais. “I should write some little thing, 
bringing in the usual parts of the picture, such 
as knees and toes, and make it mildly pathetic.” 

“But it is by no means an easy thing for me 
to do,” said Minora plaintively; “I have so lit- 
tle experience of children.” 

“Then why write it at all?” asked that sen- 
sible person Elizabeth. 

“I have as little experience as you,” said 
Irais, “because I have no children; but if you 
don’t yearn after startling originality, nothing 
is easier than to write bits about them. I be- 
lieve I could do a dozen in an hour.” 

She sat down at the writing-table, took up 
an old letter, and scribbled for about five min- 
utes. “There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, 
“you may have it — ^pink toes and all complete.” 
153 


ELIZABETH AED HER QERMAH HARDER. 


Minora put on her eyeglasses and read 
aloud: “When my baby shuts her eyes and 
sings her hymns at bedtime my stale and bat- 
tered soul is filled with awe. All sorts of vague 
memories crowd into my mind — memories of 
my own mother and myself — how many years 
ago ! — of the sweet helplessness of being gath- 
ered up half asleep in her arms, and undressed, 
and put in my cot, without being wakened, 
of the angels I believed in ; of little chil- 
dren coming straight from heaven, and still 
being surrounded, so long as they were 
good, by the shadow of white wings, — all the 
dear poetic nonsense learned, just as my baby 
is learning it, at her mother’s knee. She has 
not an idea of the beauty of the charming 
things she is told, and stares wide-eyed, with 
heavenly eyes, while her mother talks of the 
heaven she has so lately come from, and is re- 
lieved and comforted by the interrupting bread 
and milk. At two years old she does not under- 
stand angels, and does understand bread and 
milk ; at five she has vague notions about them, 
and prefers bread and milk; at ten both bread 
and milk and angels have been left behind in 
the nursery, and she has already found out that 
154 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


they are luxuries ,^not«necessary to her every-day 
life. In later years she may be disinclined to ac- 
cept truths second-hand, insist on thinking for 
herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off 
exploded traditions, be untiring in her efforts 
to live according to a high moral standard and 

to be strong, and pure, and good ’’ 

“Like tea,” explained Irais. 

“ — ^yet will she never, with all her virtues, 
possess one-thousandth part of the charm 
that clung about her when she sang, with quiet 
eyelids, her first reluctant hymns, kneeling on 
her mother’s knees. I love to come in at bed- 
time and sit in the window in the setting sun- 
shine watching the mysteries of her going to 
bed. Her mother tubs her, for she is far too 
precious to be touched by any nurse, and then 
she is rolled up in a big bath towel, and only her 
little pink toes peep out; and when she is pow- 
dered, and combed, and tied up in her night- 
dress, and all her curls are on end, and her ears 
glowing, she is knelt down on her mother’s lap, 
a little bundle of fragrant flesh, and her face re- 
flects the quiet of her mother’s face as she goes 
through her evening prayer for pity and for 
peace.” 


155 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


‘‘How very curious V’ said Minora, when she 
had finished. “That is exactly what I was go- 
ing to say.” 

“Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of 
putting it together; you can copy that if you 
like.” 

“But have you a stale soul. Miss Minora?” I 
asked. 

“Well, do you know, I rather think that is a 
good touch,” she replied ; “it will make people 
really think a man wrote the book. You know, 
I am going to take a man’s name.” 

“That is precisely what I imagined,” said 
Irais. “You will call yourself John Jones, or 
George Potts, or some such sternly common- 
place name, to emphasize your uncompromis- 
ing attitude toward all feminine weaknesses, 
and no one will be taken in.” 

“I really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me 
later, when the click of Minora’s typewriter was 
heard hesitating in the next room, “that you 
and I are writing her book for her. She takes 
down everything we say. Why does she copy 
all that about the baby? I wonder why mothers’ 
knees are supposed to be touching? I never 
learned anything at them, did you? But, then, 
156 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


in my case they were only stepmother's, and 
nobody ever sings their praises." 

“My mother was always at parties," I said; 
“and the nurse made me say my prayers in 
French." 

“And as for tubs and powder," went on Irais, 
“when I was a baby such things were not the 
fashion. There were never any bath-rooms 
and no tubs ; our faces and hands were washed, 
and there was a footbath in the room, and in 
the summer we had a bath and were put to bed 
afterward for fear we might catch cold. My 
stepmother didn't worry much; she used to 
wear pink dresses all over lace, and the older 
she got the prettier the dresses got. When is 
she going?" 

“Who? Minora? I haven't asked her that.” 

“Then I will. It is really bad for her art to 
be neglected like this. She has been here an 
unconscionable time — it must be nearly three 
weeks." 

“Yes, she came the same day you did," I said 
pleasantly. 

Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting 
that it is not worse to neglect one's art than 
one's husband, and her husband is lying all this 
157 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GEBMAH GARDEN. 


time stretched on a bed of sickness, while she is 
spending her days so agreeably with me. She 
has a way of forgetting that she has a home, or 
any other business in the world than just to 
stay on chatting with me, and reading, and sing- 
ing, and laughing at any one there is to laugh at, 
and kissing the babies, and tilting with the Man 
of Wrath. Naturally I love her — she is so 
pretty that anybody with eyes in his head must 
love her — but too much of anything is bad, and 
next month the passages and offices are to be 
whitewashed, and people who have ever white- 
washed their houses inside know what nice 
places they are to live in while it is being done ; 
and there will be no dinner for Irais, and none 
of those succulent salads full of caraway seeds 
that she so devotedly loves. I shall begin to 
lead her thoughts gently back to her duties by 
inquiring every day anxiously after her hus- 
band’s health. She is not very fond of him, be- 
cause he does not run and hold the door open 
for her every time she gets up to leave the 
room ; and though she has asked him to do so, 
and told him how much she wishes he would, 
he still won’t. She stayed once in a house 
where there was an Englishman, and his nim- 
158 


ELIZABETH AED HER QERMAH GARDEH. 


bleness in regard to doors and chairs so im- 
pressed her that her husband has had no peace 
since, and each time she has to go out of a 
room she is reminded of her disregarded 
wishes, so that a shut door is to her symbolic 
of the failure of her married life, and the very 
sight of one makes her wonder why she was 
born ; at least, that is what she told me once, in 
a burst of confidence. He is quite a nice, harm- 
less little man, pleasant to talk to, good-tempered, 
and full of fun; but he thinks he is too old 
to begin to learn new and uncomfortable ways, 
and he has that horror of being made better by 
his wife that distinguishes so many righteous 
men, and is shared by the Man of Wrath, who 
persists in holding his glass in his left hand at 
meals, because if he did not (and I don’t be- 
lieve he particularly likes doing it) his relations 
might say that marriage has improved him, and 
thus drive the iron into his soul. This habit oc- 
casions an almost daily argument between one 
or other of the babies and myself. 

“April, hold your glass in your right hand.*^ 

“But papa doesn’t.” 

“When you are as old as papa you can do as 
you like.” 


159 


ELIZABETH AlfD HER GERMAH GARDEN, 


This was embellished only yesterday by Mi- 
nora adding impressively, “And only think how 
strange it would look if everybody held their 
glasses so,” 

April was greatly struck by the force of this 
proposition. 

• January 28. — It is very cold — fifteen degrees 
of frost Reaumur but perfectly delicious, still, 
bright weather, and one feels jolly and energet- 
ic and amiably disposed toward everybody. The 
two young ladies are still here, but the air is so 
buoyant that even they don’t weigh on me any 
longer, and, besides, they have both announced 
their approaching departure, so that after all I 
shall get my whitewashing done in peace, and 
the house will have on its clean pinafore in time 
to welcome the spring. 

Minora has painted my portrait, and is going 
to present it as a parting gift to the Man of 
W rath ; and the fact that I let her do it, and sat 
meekly times innumerable, proves conclusively, 
I hope, that I am not vain. When Irais first 
saw it she laughed till she cried, and at once 
commissioned her to paint hers, so that she 
may take it away with her and give it to her 
160 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


husband on his birthday, which happens to be 
early in February. Indeed, if it were not for 
this birthday, I really think she would have for- 
gotten to go at all; but birthdays are great and 
solemn festivals with us, never allowed to slip 
by unnoticed, and always celebrated in the pres- 
ence of a sympathetic crowd of relations (gath- 
ered from far and near to tell you how well you 
are wearing, and that nobody would ever 
dream, and that really it is wonderful), who 
stand round a sort of sacrificial altar, on which 
your years are offered up as a burnt-offering 
to the gods in the shape of lighted pink and 
white candles, stuck in a very large, flat, jammy 
cake. The cake with its candles is the chief 
feature, and on the table round it lie the gifts 
each person present is more or less bound to 
give. As my birthday falls in the winter I get 
mittens as well as blotting-books and photo- 
graph-frames, and if it were in the summer I 
should get photograph-frames, blotting-books, 
and no mittens; but whatever the present may 
be, and by whomsoever given, it has to be wel- 
comed with the noisiest gratitude, and loudest 
exclamations of joy, and such words as ’ent- 
siickendj reisend, herrlich, wundervoll, and 
161 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GEBMAH GARDEN. 


SUSS repeated over and over again, until the 
unfortunate Geburtstagskind feels indeed that 
another year has gone, and that she has grown 
older, and wiser, and more tired of folly and 
vain repetitions. A flag is hoisted, and all the 
morning the rites are celebrated, the cake eaten, 
healths drunk, speeches made, and hands 
nearly shaken off. The neighboring parsons 
drive up, and when nobody is looking their 
wives count the candles in the cake; the active 
lady in the next Schloss spares time to send a 
pot of flowers, and to look up my age in the 
Gotha Almanack; a deputation comes from the 
farms, headed by the chief inspector in white 
kid gloves, who invokes Heaven’s blessings on 
the gracious lady’s head ; and the babies are en- 
chanted, and sit in a corner trying on all the 
mittens. In the evening there is a dinner fo; 
the relations and the chief local authorities, 
with more health-drinking and speechifying, 
and next morning, when I come downstairs 
thankful to have done with it, I am confronted 
by the altar still in its place, cake crumbs and 
candle-grease and all, because any hasty re- 
moval of it would imply a most lamentable want 
of sentiment, deplorable in anybody, but scan- 
162 


ELIZABETH AED HER QERMAE OARDEE. 


daloHS and disgusting in a tender female. All 
birthdays are observed in this fashion, and not 
a few wise persons go for a short trip just about 
the time theirs is due, and I think I shall imitate 
them next year; only trips to the country or 
seaside in December are not usually pleasant, 
and if I go to a town there are sure to be rela- 
tions in it, and then the cake will spring up 
mushroom-like from the teeming soil of their 
affection. 

I hope it has been made evident in these 
pages how superior Irais and myself are to the 
ordinary weaknesses of mankind; if any further 
proof were needed, it is furnished by the fact 
that we both, in defiance of tradition, scorn this 
celebration of birthday rites. Years ago, when 
first I knew her, and long before we were either 
of us married, I sent her a little brass candle- 
stick on her birthday; and when mine followed 
a few months later, she sent me a note-book. 
No notes were written in it, and on her next 
birthday I presented it to her; she thanked me 
profusely in the customary manner, and when 
my turn came I received the brass candlestick. 
Since then we alternately enjoy the possession 
of each of these articles, and the present ques- 
163 


ELIZABETH AHD HER aERMAH HARDER. 


tion is comfortably settled once and for all, at a 
minimum of trouble and expense. We never 
mention this little arrangement except at the 
proper time, when we send a letter of fervid 
thanks. 

This radiant weather, when mere living is a 
'3y, and sitting still over the fire out of the 
question, has been going on for more than a 
v/eek. Sleighing and skating have been our 
chief occupation, especially skating, which is 
more than usually fascinating here, because the 
place is intersected by small canals communi- 
cating with a lake and the river belonging to 
the lake, and as everything is frozen black and 
hard, we can skate for miles straight ahead 
without being obliged to turn round and come 
back again — at all times an annoying, and even 
mortifying, proceeding. Irais skates beau- 
tifully; modesty is the only obstacle to my say- 
ing the same of myself, but I may remark that all 
Germans skate well, for the simple reason that 
every year of their lives, for three or four 
months, they may do it as much as they like. 
Minora was astonished and disconcerted by 
finding herself left behind, and arriving at the 
place where tea meets us half an hour after we 
164 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEN. 


had finished. In some places the banks of the 
canals are so high that only our heads appear 
level with the fields, and it is, as Minora noted 
in her book, a curious sight to see three female 
heads skimming along apparently by them- 
selves, and enjoying it tremendously. When 
the banks are low we appear to be gliding de- 
liciously over the roughest plowed fields, with 
or without legs according to circumstances. Be- 
fore we start I fix on the place where tea and 
a sleigh are to meet us, and we drive home 
again ; because skating against the wind is as de- 
testable as skating with it is delightful, and 
an unkind Nature arranges its blowing with- 
out the smallest regard for our convenience. 

Yesterday, by way of a change, we went for a 
picnic to the shores of the Baltic, ice-bound at 
this season, and utterly desolate at our nearest 
point. I have a weakness for picnics, especially 
in winter, when the mosquitoes cease from 
troubling and the ant-hills are at rest ; and of all 
my many favorite picnic spots this one on the 
Baltic is the loveliest and best. As it is a three- 
hours’ drive, the Man of Wrath is loud in his 
lamentations when the special sort of weather 
comes which means, as experience has taught 
165 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


him, this particular excursion. There must be 
deep snow, hard frost, no wind, and a cloudless 
sky ; and when, on waking up, I see these con- 
ditions fulfilled, then it would need some very 
potent reason to keep me from having out a 
sleigh and going off. It is, I admit, a hard day 
for the horses; but why have horses if they are 
not to take you where you want to go to, and 
at the time you want to go? And why should 
not horses have hard days as well as everybody 
else? The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and 
has no eye for nature and frozen seas, and is 
simply bored by a long drive through a forest 
that does not belong to him ; a single turnip on 
his own place is more admirable in his eyes than 
the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that ever 
reared its snow-crowned head against the set- 
ting sunlight. Now observe the superiority of 
woman, who sees that both are good, and after 
having gazed at the pine and been made happy 
by its beauty, goes home and placidly eats the 
turnip. He went once and only once to this 
particular place, and made us feel so small by 
his blase behavior that I never invite him now. 
It is a beautiful spot, endless forest stretching 
along the shore as far as the eye can reach ; and 
166 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEN. 


after driving through it for miles you come 
suddenly, at the end of an avenue of arching 
trees, upon the glistening oily sea, with the or- 
ange-colored sails of distant fishing-smacks 
shining in the sunlight. Whenever I have been 
there it has been windless weather, and the 
silence so profound that I could hear my pulses 
beating. The humming of insects and the sud- 
den scream of a jay are the only sounds in sum- 
mer, and in winter the stillness is the stillness of 
death. 

Every paradise has its serpent, however, and 
this one is so infested by mosquitoes during the 
season when picnics seem most natural, that 
those of my visitors who have been taken there 
for a treat have invariably lost their tempers, 
and made the quiet shores ring with their wail- 
ing and lamentations. These despicable but ir- 
ritating insects don’t seem to have anything to 
do but to sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting 
for any prey Providence may send them; and 
as soon as the carriage appears they rise up in 
a cloud, and rush to meet us, almost dragging 
us out bodily, and never leave us until we drive 
away again. The sudden view of the sea from 
the mossy, pine-covered height directly above 
167 


ELIZABETH AHD HER OERMAH GARDEE. 


it where we picnic; the wonderful stretch of 
lonely shore with the forest to the water’s edge ; 
the colored sails in the blue distance ; the fresh- 
ness, the brightness, the vastness — all is lost 
upon the picnickers, and made worse than in- 
different to them, by the perpetual necessity 
they are under of fighting these horrid crea- 
tures. It is nice being the only person who 
ever goes there or shows it to anybody, but if 
more people went, perhaps the mosquitoes 
would be less lean, and hungry, and pleased to 
see us. It has, however, the advantage of being 
a suitable place to which to take refractory vis- 
itors when they have stayed too long, or left 
my books out in the garden all night, or other- 
wise made their presence a burden too grievous 
to be borne; then one fine hot morning, when 
they are all looking limp, I suddenly propose a 
picnic on the Baltic. I have never known this 
proposal fail to be greeted with exclamations of 
surprise and delight. 

“The Baltic! You never told us you were 
within driving distance? How heavenly to get 
a breath of sea air on a day like this I The very 
thought puts new life into me! And how 


168 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


delightful to see the Baltic! Oh, please take 
us 1” And then I take them. 

But on a brilliant winter’s day my conscience 
is as clear as the frosty air itself, and yesterday 
morning we started off in the gayest of spirits, 
even Minora being disposed to laugh immoder- 
ately on the least provocation. Only our eyes 
were allowed to peep out from the fur and 
woolen wrappings necessary to our heads if we 
would come back with our ears and noses in 
the same places they were in when we started, 
and for the first two miles the mirth created by 
each other’s strange appearance was uproari- 
ous — a fact I mention merely to show what an 
effect dry, bright, intense cold produces on 
healthy bodies, and how much better it is to go 
out in it and enjoy it than to stay indoors and 
sulk. As we passed through the neighboring 
village with cracking of whip and jingling of 
bells, heads popped up. at the windows to stare, 
and the only living thing in the silent, sunny 
street was a melancholy fowl with ruffled feath- 
ers, which looked at us reproachfully as we 
dashed with so much energy over the crackling 
snow. 

‘‘Oh, foolish bird!” Irais called out as we 
169 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAH GARDEN. 


passed; “you’ll be indeed a cold fowl if you 
stand there motionless, and every one prefers 
them hot in weather like this!” 

And then we all laughed exceedingly, as 
though the most splendid joke had been made, 
and before we had done we were out of the vil- 
lage and in the open country beyond, and could 
see my house and garden far away behind, glit- 
tering in the sunshine ; and in front of us lay the 
forest, with its vistas of pines stretching away 
into infinity, and a drive through it of fourteen 
miles before we reached the sea. It was a hoar- 
frost day, and the forest was an enchanted for- 
est leading into fairyland, and though Irais and 
I have been there often before, and always 
thought it beautiful, yet yesterday we stood 
under the final arch of frosted trees, struck si- 
lent by the sheer loveliness of the place. For a 
long way out the sea was frozen, and then there 
was a deep blue line, and a cluster of motion- 
less orange sails; at our feet a narrow strip of 
pale yellow sand; right and left the line of 
sparkling forest; and we ourselves standing in 
a world of white and diamond traceries. The 
stillness of an eternal Sunday lay on the place 
like a benediction. 


170 


ELIZABETH AED HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


Alinora broke the silence by remarking that 
Dresden was pretty, but she thought this beat 
it almost. 

“I don’t quite see,” said Irais in a hushed 
voice, as though she were in a holy place, “how 
the two can be compared.” 

“Yes, Dresden is more convenient, of 
course,” replied Minora; after which we turned 
away and thought we would keep her quiet by 
feeding her, so we went back to the sleigh and 
had the horses taken out and their cloths put 
on, and they were walked up and down a distant 
glade while we sat in the sleigh and picnicked. 
It is a hard day for the horses, — nearly 
thirty miles there and back and no stable in the 
middle; but they are so fat and spoiled that it 
cannot do them much harm sometimes to taste 
the bitterness of life. I warmed soup in a little 
apparatus I have for such occasions, which 
helped to take the chilliness off the sandwiches 
— this is the only unpleasant part of a winter 
picnic, the clammy quality of the provisions 
just when you most long for something very 
hot. Minora let her nose very carefully out of 
its wrappings, took a mouthful, and covered it 
up quickly again. She was nervous lest it 
171 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


should be frost-nipped, and truth compels me to 
add that her nose is not a bad nose, and 
might even be pretty on anybody else; but she 
does not know how to carry it, and there is an 
art in the angle at which one’s nose is held, just 
as in everything else, and really noses v/ere 
intended for something besides mere blowing. 

It is the most beautiful thing in the world to 
eat sandwiches with immense fur and woolen 
gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much 
fur as anything, and choked exceedingly dur- 
ing the process. Minora was angry at this, and 
at last pulled off her glove, but quickly put it 
on again. 

“How very unpleasant,” she remarked after 
swallowing a large piece of fur. 

“It will wrap around your pipes, and keep 
them warm,” said Irais. 

“Pipes !” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted 
by such vulgarity. 

“Fm afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she 
continued to choke and splutter ; “we are all in 
the same case, and I don’t know how to alter 
it.” 

“There are such things as forks, I suppose,” 
snapped Minora. 


172 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


“That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obvious- 
ness of the remedy; but of what use are forks 
if they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to 
continue to eat her gloves. 

By the time we had finished the sun was al- 
ready low behind the trees and the clouds begin- 
ning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman 
was given sandwiches and soup, and while he 
led the horses up and down with one hand and 
held his lunch in the other, we packed up — or, 
to be correct, I packed, and the others looked 
on and gave me valuable advice. 

This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy 
years old, and was born on the place, and has 
driven its occupants for fifty years, and I am 
nearly as fond of him as I am of the sun-dial. 
Indeed, I don’t know what I should do without 
him, so entirely does he appear to understand 
and approve of my tastes and wishes. No 
drive is too long or difficult for the horses if I 
want to take it, no place impossible to reach if 
I want to go to it, no weather or roads too bad 
to prevent my going out if I wish to — to all my 
suggestions he responds with the readiest 
cheerfulness, and smooths away all objections 
raised by the Man of Wrath, who rewards his 
173 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAE GARDEN. 


Alacrity in doing my pleasure by speaking ot 
him as an alter Esel. In the summer, on fine 
evenings, I love to drive late and alone in tht 
scented forests, and when I have reached a dark 
part stop, and sit quite still, listening to the 
nightingales repeating their little tune over and 
over again after interludes of gurgling, or, d 
there are no nightingales, listening to the mar- 
velous silence, and letting its blessedness de- 
scend into my soul. The nightingales in 
the forests about here all sing the same tune, 
and in the same key (E flat) : 



I don’t know whether all nightingales do this, 
or if it is peculiar to this particular spot. When 
they have sung it once they clear their throats a 
little, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it 
is the prettiest little song in the world. How 
could I indulge my passion for these drives with 
their pauses without Peter? He is so used to them 
that he stops now at the right moment without 
having to be told, and he is ready to drive me 
all night if I wish it, with no sign of anything 
but cheerful willingness on his nice old face. 
174 


ELIZABETH AED HER QERMAE GARDEN, 

The Man of Wrath deplores these eccentric 
tastes, as he calls them, of mine; but has given 
up trying to prevent my indulging them be- 
cause, while he is deploring in one part of the 
house, I have slipped out at a door in the other, 
and am gone before he can catch me, and have 
reached and am lost in the shadows of the for- 
est by the time he has discovered that I am no- 
where to be found. 

The brightness of Peter’s perfections are 
sullied, however, by one spot, and that is that as 
age creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold 
the horses in if they don’t want to be held in, 
but he goes to sleep sometimes on his box if I 
have him out too soon after lunch, and has up- 
set me twice within the last year — once last win- 
ter out of a sleigh, and once this summer, when 
the horses shied at a bicycle, and bolted into the 
ditch on one side of the chaussee (German for 
highroad), and the bicycle was so terrified at 
the horses shying that it shied too into the ditch 
on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, 
and the bicycle was smashed, and we were 
all very unhappy, except Peter, who never lost 
his pieasant smile, and looked so placid that my 


175 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH QARDEH. 


tongue clave to the roof of my mouth when I 
tried to make it scold him. 

'‘But I should think he ought to have been 
thoroughly scolded on an occasion like that/" 
said Minora, to whom I had been telling this 
story as we wandered on the yellow sands while 
the horses were being put in the sleigh ; and she 
glanced nervously up at Peter, whose mild head 
was visible between the bushes above us. "Shall 
we get home before dark?’" she asked. 

The sun had altogether disappeared behind 
the pines and only the very highest of the little 
clouds were still pink ; out at sea the mists were 
creeping up, and the sails of the fishing-smacks 
had turned a dull brown; a flight of wild geese 
passed across the disk of the moon with loud 
cacklings. 

"Before dark ?” echoed Irais ; "I should think 
not. It is dark now nearly in the forest, and we 
shall have the loveliest moonlight drive back.” 

"But it is surely very dangerous to let a man 
who goes to sleep drive you,"" said Minora ap- 
prehensively. 

"But he’s such an old dear,” I said. 

"Yes, yes, no doubt,” she replied testily; "but 


176 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


there are wakeful old dears to be had, and on 
a box they are preferable/’ 

Irais laughed. “You are growing quite 
amusing, Miss Minora,” she said. 

“He isn’t on a box to-day,” said I; “and I 
never knew him to go to sleep standing up be- 
hind us on a sleigh.” 

But Minora was not to be appeased, and mut- 
tered something about seeing no fun in fool- 
hardiness, which shows how alarmed she was, 
for it was rude. 

Peter, however, behaved beautifully on the 
way home, and Irais and I at least were as 
happy as possible driving back, with all the 
glories of the western sky flashing at us every 
now and then at the end of a long avenue as we 
swiftly passed, and later on, when they had 
faded, myriads of stars in the narrow black strip 
of sky over our heads. It was bitterly cold, 
and Minora was silent, and not in the least in- 
clined to laugh with us as she had been six 
hours before. 

“Have you enjoyed yourself. Miss Minora?” 
inquired Irais, as we got out of the forest on to 
the chaussee, and the lights of the village be- 
fore ours twinkled in the distance. 

177 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAE GARDEN. 


‘‘How many degrees do you suppose there 
are now?’' was Minora’s reply to this question. 

“Degrees? — Of frost? Oh, dear me, are you 
cold?” cried Irais solicitously. 

“Well, it isn’t exactly warm, is it?” said Mi- 
nora sulkily; and Irais pinched me. “Well, but 
think how much colder you would have been 
without all that fur you ate for lunch inside 
you,” she said. 

“And what a nice chapter you will be able to 
write about the Baltic,” said 1. “Why, it is 
practically certain that you are the first English 
person who has ever been to just> this part 
of it.” 

“Isn’t there some English poem,” said Irais, 
“about being the first who ever burst ” 

“ ‘Into that silent sea,’ ” finished Minora 
hastily. “You can’t quote that without its con- 
text, you know.” 

“But I wasn’t going to,” said Irais meekly, 
“I only paused to breathe. I must breathe, or 
perhaps I might die.” 

The lights from my energetic friend’s Schloss 
shone brightly down upon us as we passed 
round the base of the hill on which it stands ; 
she is very proud of this hill, as well she may 
178 


ELIZABETH AHD HER OERMA^ QARDEE. 


be, seeing it is the only one in the whole dis- 
trict. 

“Do you never go there?’’ asked Minora, 
jerking her head in the direction of the house. 

“Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and 
I should feel I was in the way if I went often.’’ 

“It would be interesting to see another North 
German interior,” said Minora; “and I should 
be obliged if you would take me.” 

“But I can’t fall upon her suddenly with a 
strange girl,” I protested; “and we are not at 
all on such intimate terms as to justify my tak- 
ing all my visitors to see her.” 

“What do you want to see another interior 
for?” asked Irais. “I can tell you what it is 
like; and if you went nobody would speak to 
you, and if you were to ask questions, and be- 
gan to take notes, the good lady would stare 
at you in the frankest amazement, and think 
Elizabeth had brought a young lunatic out for 
an airing. Everybody is not as patient as Eliza- 
beth,” added Irais, anxious to pay off old 
scores. 

“I would do a great deal for you. Miss Mi- 
nora,” I said, “but I can’t do that.” 

“If we went,” said Irais, “Elizabeth and I 
179 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEN. 


would be placed with great ceremony on a sofa 
behind a large, polished oval table with a 
crochet-mat in the center — it has got a crochet- 
mat in the center, hasn’t it?” I nodded. “And 
you would sit on one side of the four little 
podgy, buttony, tasselly red chairs that are 
ranged on the other side of the table facing the 
sofa. They are red, Elizabeth?” Again I 
nodded. “The floor is painted yellow, and there 
is no carpet except a rug in front of the sofa. 
The paper is dark chocolate color, almost 
black; that is in order that after years of use 
the dirt may not show, and the room need not 
be done up. Dirt is like wickedness, you see. 
Miss Minora — its being there never matters; it 
is only when it shows so much as to be appar- 
ent to everybody that we are ashamed of it. At 
intervals round the high walls are chairs and 
cabinets with lamps on them, and in one corner 
is a great white cold stove — or is it majolica?” 
she asked, turning to me. 

“No, it is white.” 

“There are a great many lovely big windows, 
all ready to let in the air and the sun, but they 
are as carefully covered with brown lace cur- 
tains under^heavy stuff ones as though a whole 
180 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


row of houses were just opposite, with peering 
eyes at every window trying to look in, instead 
of there only being fields, and trees, and birds. 
No fire, no sunlight, no books, no flowers; but 
a consoling smell of red cabbage coming up 
under the door, mixed, in due season, with 
soapsuds.” 

“When did you go there?” asked Minora. 

“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did 
I not go there? I have been calling there all 
my life.” 

Minora's eyes rolled doubtfully first at me, 
then at Irais, from the depths of her head-wrap- 
pings; they are large eyes with long dark eye- 
lashes, and far be it from me to deny that each 
eye taken by itself is fine, but they are put in all 
wrong. 

“The only thing you would learn there,” went 
on Irais, “would be the significance of sofa 
corners in Germany. If we three went there to- 
gether, I should be ushered into the right-hand 
corner of the sofa, because it is the place of 
honor, and I am the greatest stranger; Eliza- 
beth would be invited to seat herself in the left- 
hand corner, as next in importance ; the hostess 
would sit near us in an armchair; and you, as 
181 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH QARDEH, 


a person of no importance whatever, would 
be left to sit where you could, or would be put 
on a chair facing us, and with the entire breadth 
of the table between us to mark the immense 
social gulf that separates the married woman 
from the mere virgin. These sofa corners make 
the drawing of nice distinctions possible in a 
way that nothing else could. The world might 
come to an end, and create less sensation in do- 
ing it than you would. Miss Minora, if by any 
chance you got into the right-hand corner of 
one. That you are put on a chair on the other 
side of the table places you at once in the scale 
of precedence, and exactly defines your social 
position, or rather your complete want of a so- 
cial position.” And Irais tilted her nose ever 
so little heavenward. ‘‘Note it,” she added, “ar 
the heading of your next chapter.” 

“Note what?” asked Minora impatiently. 

“Why, 'The Subtle Significance of Sofas,’ of 
course,” replied Irais. “If,” she continued, as 
Minora made no reply appreciative of this sug- 
gestion, “you were to call unexpectedly, the 
bad luck which pursues the innocent would 
most likely make you hit on a washing-day, and 
the distracted mistress of the house would keep 
183 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH OARDEH. 


you waiting in the cold room so long while she 
changed her dress, that you would begin to fear 
you were to be left to perish from want and 
hunger; and when she did appear, would show 
by the bitterness of her welcoming smile the 
rage that was boiling in her heart.” 

“But what has the mistress of the house to 
do with washing?” 

“What has she to do with washing? Oh, you 
sweet innocent — pardon my familiarity, but 
such ignorance of country-life customs is very 
touching in one who is writing a book about 
them.” 

“Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” 
said Minora loftily. 

“Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “are 
seasons set apart by the Hausfrau to be kept 
holy. They only occur every two or three 
months, and while they are going on the whole 
house is in an uproar, every other consideration 
sacrificed, husband and children sunk into in- 
significance, and no one approaching, or inter- 
fering with, the mistress of the house during 
these days of purification, but at their peril.” 

“You don’t really mean,” said Minora, “that 
you only wash your clothes four times a year?” 

183 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


“Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais. 

“Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said 
Minora emphatically. 

Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows 
of hers. “Then you must take care and not 
marry a German,” she said. 

“But what is the object of it?” went on Mi- 
nora. 

“Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.” 

“Yes, yes, but why only at such long inter- 
vals?” 

“It is an outward and visible sign of vast pos- 
sessions in the shape of linen. If you were to 
want to have your clothes washed every week, 
as you do in England, you would be put down 
as a person who only has just enough to last 
that length of time, and would be an object of 
general contempt.” 

“But I should be a clean object,” cried Mi- 
nora, “and my house would not be full of ac- 
cumulated dirt.” 

We said nothing — there was nothing to be 
said. 

“It must be a happy land, that England of 
yours,” Irais remarked after a while with a sigh 
— a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to 
184 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


her mind of a land full of washerwomen, and 
agile gentlemen darting at door-handles. 

“It is a clean land, at any rate,'' replied Mi- 
nora. 

^7 don't want to go and live in it,” I said — for 
we were driving up to the house, and a memory 
of fogs and umbrellas came into my mind as 
I looked up fondly at its dear old west front, 
and I felt that what I want is to live and die 
just here, and that there never was such a happy 
woman as Elizabeth. 

April 1 8 . — I have been so busy ever since 
Irais and Minora left that I can hardly believe 
the spring is here, and the garden hurrying on 
its green and flowered petticoat — only its petti- 
coat as yet, for though the underwood is a 
fairyland of tender little leaves, the trees above 
are still quite bare. 

February was gone before I well knew that 
it had come, so deeply was I engaged in mak- 
ing hotbeds, and having them sown with pe- 
tunias, verbenas, and nicotina afflnis; while no 
less than thirty are dedicated solely to vege- 
tables, it having been borne in upon me lately 
that vegetables must be interesting things to 
185 


ELIZABETH AHD HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


grow, besides possessing solid virtues not given 
to flowers, and that I might as well take tlie 
orchard and kitchen garden under my wing. So 
I have rushed in with all the zeal of utter inex- 
perience, and my February evenings were spent 
poring over gardening books, and my days in 
applying the freshly absorbed wisdom. Who 
says that February is a dull, sad, slow month 
in the country? It was of the cheerfulest, 
svviftest description here, and its mild days en- 
abled me to get on beautifully with the digging 
and manuring, and filled my rooms with snow- 
drops. The longer I live the greater is my re- 
spect and affection for manure in all its forms, 
and already, though the year is so young, a con- 
siderable portion of its pin-money has been 
spent on artificial manure. The Man of Wrath 
says he never met a young woman who spent 
her money that way before; I remarked that it 
must be nice to have an original wife; and he 
retorted that the word original hardly de- 
scribed me, and that the word eccentric was the 
one required. Very well, I suppose I am ec- 
centric, since even my husband says so; but if 
my eccentricities are of such a practical nature 
as to result later in the biggest cauliflowers and 
186 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN, 


tenderest lettuce in Prussia, wh) tlien he ought 
to be the first to rise up and call me blessed. 

I sent to England for vegetable-marrow 
seeds, as they are not grown here, and people 
try and make boiled cucumbers take their place ; 
but boiled cucumbers are nasty things, ana I 
don’t see why marrows should not do here per- 
fectly well. These, and primrose-roots, are tiie 
English contributions to my garden. I brought 
over the roots in a tin box last time I came 
from England, and am anxious to see whether 
they will consent to live here. Certain it is that 
they don’t exist in the Fatherland, so I can only 
conclude the winter kills them, for surely, if 
such lovely things would grow, they never 
would have been overlooked. Irais is deeply 
interested in the experiment ; she reads so 
many English books, and has heard so much 
about primroses, and they have got so mixed up 
in her mind with leagues, and dames, and Dis- 
raelis, that she longs to see this mysterious 
political flower, and has made me promise to 
telegraph when it appears, and she will come 
over. But they are not going to do anything 
this year, and I only hope those cold days did 
not send them off to the Paradise of flowers i 
187 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


am afraid their first impression of Germany 
was a chilly one. 

Irais writes about once a week, and inquires 
after the garden and the babies, and announces 
her intention of coming back as soon as the 
numerous relations staying with her have left, — 
“which they won’t do,” she wrote the other day, 
“until the first frosts nip them off, when they 
will disappear like belated dahlias — double ones 
of course, for single dahlias are too charming 
to be compared to relations. I have every sort 
of cousin and uncle and aunt here, and here they 
have been ever since my husband’s birthday — ■ 
not the same ones exactly, but I get so con- 
fused that I never know where one ends and 
the other begins. My husband goes off after 
breakfast to look at his crops, he says, and I 
am left at their mercy. I wish I had crops to 
go and look at — I should be grateful even for 
one, and would look at it from morning till 
night, and quite stare it out of countenance, 
sooner than stay at home and have the truth 
told me by enigmatic aunts. Do you know my 
Aunt Bertha? She, in particular, spends her 
time propounding obscure questions for my so- 
lution. I get so tired and worried trying to 
188 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


guess the answers, which are always truths sup- 
posed to be good for me to hear. ‘Why do you 
wear your hair on your forehead?’ she asks, — 
and that sets me off wondering why I do wear 
it on my forehead, and what she wants to know 
for, or whether she does know and only wants 
to know if I will answer truthfully, ‘I am sure 
I don’t know, aunt,’ I say meekly, after puzzling 
over it for ever so long; ‘perhaps my maid 
knows. Shall I ring and ask her?’ And then 
she informs me that I wear it so to hide an ugly 
line she says I have down the middle of my 
forehead, and that betokens a listless and dis- 
contented disposition. Well, if she knew, what 
did she ask me for ? Whenever I am with them 
they ask me riddles like that, and I simply lead 
a dog's life. Oh, my dear, relations are like 
drugs,— useful, sometimes, and even pleas- 
ant, if taken in small quantities and seldom, but 
dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the 
truly wise avoid them.” 

From Minora I have had only one communi- 
cation since her departure, in which she thanked 
me for her pleasant visit, and said she was send- 
ing me a bottle of English embrocation to rub 
on my bruises after skating; that it was won- 
189 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


derful stuff, and she was sure I would like it; 
and that it cost two marks, and would I send 
stamps. I pondered long over this. Was it a 
parting hit, intended as revenge for our having 
laughed at her? Was she personally interested 
in the sale of embrocation? Or was it merely 
Minora’s idea of a graceful return for my hos- 
pitality? As for bruises, nobody who skates 
decently regards it as a bruise-producing exer- 
cise, and whenever there were any they were all 
on Minora; but she did happen to turn round 
once, I remember, just as I was in the act of 
tumbling down for the first and only time, and 
her delight was but thinly veiled by her excess- 
ive solicitude and sympathy. I sent her the 
stamps, received the bottle, and resolved to let 
her drop out of my life; I had been a good 
Samaritan to her at the request of my friend, 
but the best of Samaritans resents the offer of 
healing oil for his own use. 

But why waste a thought on Minora at Eas- 
ter, the real beginning of the year in defiance of 
calendars? She belongs to the winter that is 
past, to the darkness that is over, and has no 
part or lot in the life I shall lead for the next six 




190 


ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN. 


months. Oh, I could dance and sing for joy 
that the spring is here! What a resurrection 
of beauty there is in my garden, and of bright- 
est hope in my heart ! The whole of this radiant 
Easter day I have spent out of doors, sitting at 
first among the windflowers and celandines, and 
then, later, walking with the babies to the 
Hirschwald, to see what the spring had been 
doing there ; and the afternoon was so hot that 
we lay a long time on the turf, blinking up 
through the leafless branches of the silver 
birches at the soft, fat little white clouds float- 
ing motionless in the blue. We had tea on the 
grass in the sun, and when it began to grow 
late, and the babies were in bed, and all the lit- 
tle windflowers folded up for the night, I still 
wandered in the green paths, my heart full of 
happiest gratitude. It makes one very humble 
to see one’s self surrounded by such a wealth 
of beauty and perfection anonymously lavished 
and to think of the infinite meanness of our 
own grudging charities, and how displeased we 
are if they are not promptly and properly ap- 
preciated. I do sincerely trust that the bene- 
diction that is always awaiting me in my gar- 


191 


ELIZABETH AHD HER QERMAH GARDEN. 


den may by degrees be more deserved, and that 
I may grow in grace, and patience, and cheer- 
fulness, just like the happy flowers I so much 
love. 


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